


Reformation/Reaffirmation

by alittlepieceofgundamwing_archivist



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Adventure, Blood and Violence, Lemon, M/M, Manipulation, Mystery, Original Character(s), POV Wufei, Prison, Yaoi, post EW in an AU way, ref. to prior main character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 05:10:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 126,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14537379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlepieceofgundamwing_archivist/pseuds/alittlepieceofgundamwing_archivist
Summary: by June--Things didn't go so well for Wufei after the wars. These are his adventures.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Expect a small cast of OCs that I have tried to make as multi-dimensional and real as the pilots. Still, this is primarily about Wufei and his relationships with the other pilots, especially Duo. ...... And, uh, this is Wufei, first person POV. I'm giving it a shot.

And the new law said that seventeen year olds could do federal time.  
You were the first one, so i sing this song for you,  
William Stanaforth Donahue,  
Your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland,  
But you made a bad decision or two.  
_-The Fall of the Star High School Running Back_  
  
The sound of pounding feet on cement jolted me awake and had me reaching for a gun I obviously no longer carried or had the luxury of owning. I looked across the cell to see Onur doing the same. We exchanged glances before sitting up in our bunks to get a better view. The pounding feet were headed for the cell directly across from ours. I slid down from the bunk and took two quick strides to the barred front of the cell, standing on tip-toe, trying to see through the crowd of guards gathering between the east and west rows of cells. Onur came to stand beside me, his dark eyes narrowed.  
  
"That's Benji's room," he murmured.  
  
"Can you see anything?" I snapped. "There are too many guards; I can't-"  
  
Onur glanced over at  me. "I'm taller than you, but not by that much."  
  
I growled and pressed my face against the bars, struggling to see directly to my right. "Karl." No answer. I slid closer to the wall and rapped my knuckles against the cinder blocks. "Hey, Karl!"  
  
"Benji's dead, Chang," was his reply. "Gutted like a fish."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You heard me."  
  
"Did you see it happen?"  
  
"Strangely, no," he said, voice just loud enough to be heard over the shouting of the guards and the inmates who wanted to know what was going on. "Slept like the dead, actually."  
  
I strained to see him, but could only catch pale fingers gripping the bars. "How long's it been since that's happened?"  
  
"Oh, about six years. And I feel like I could go back to sleep now. If the sound of the guards running hadn't woken me, I'd still be dreaming of breakfast that tastes like real food. Curiouser and curiouser."  
  
I looked down at my bare feet, realizing I'd forgotten to put on my flip-flops, and then to my roommate. He was staring at his hands where they gripped the bars, brow furrowed in thought. Come to think of it, I felt off, too. I rubbed my fingers in my eyes and they were gritty. I reached behind my head and found that, unlike most mornings, my hair was free of tangles. I'd slept without moving. My mouth tasted like last night's garlic potatoes, and all I wanted to do was crawl back under my blanket and sleep until lunch. Highly unusual. And Karl was an insomniac. Even stranger for him.  
  
"We should have heard the fight," I muttered. "Karl, you especially should have. Everyone should have heard a struggle."  
  
I heard a pen tapping against the bars. Even if he was groggy, Karl couldn't resist his compulsions for long. "I don't think there was one, Chang," he said, voice even and disinterested. I knew better than to believe that tone. "No blood anywhere other than his throat."  
  
"I thought you said he was gutted like a fish."  
  
A pause. "I was being dramatic, going for a good visual."  
  
"Oh... right."  
  
"Anyway, I'd say his death was quick and quiet. Whoever went in there to do it knew what they were about."  
  
"You think it was premeditated? Organized?"  
  
Next to me, Onur was shaking his head. "Benji didn't have enemies here. Everyone liked him." He said it with the finality of one who knew the truth and who wouldn't believe otherwise even if he didn't. Onur was the type who believed that he'd been put in this place for a good reason. "Romefeller even liked him," he added. "And Romefeller doesn't get along with anyone."  
  
"They would be the obvious suspects," Karl commented. "Relations between Romefeller and White Fang haven't been good since this facility's founding three years ago."  
  
That was certainly true. Most of the fights that broke out, and nearly all of the shouting matches that started in the mess hall, were between those two old enemies. Straining my ears, I could hear our speculations echoing along the rows of cells and repeated among the guards. I could already hear how the announcement over the loudspeakers would go, Prescott's voice crisp and judgmental. "Faction violence was the cause of this unfortunate incident, violence between old enemies that should have buried their hatchets years ago. Benjamin Bennett will be missed by his friends and by Rehabilitation Center for New Pacifism faculty and staff. He was a model participant in the program and an inspiration to all of us, a promise of what Total Pacifism has to offer." We would all shake our heads when she said this because Benji was the grizzliest of grizzly veterans. But the important thing was, he was "reformed."  
  
Prescott's announcement continued to play out in my head. "At times like these we are reminded of how far we have come in the rehabilitative process." She would include herself in that "we" because she's ex-OZ herself, but somehow ended up behind the desk instead of behind bars in the women's cell block. "And we are reminded of how far we still have to go. This violence is a failure on our part, and we must work even harder to overcome old prejudices and move beyond our..."  
  
And so on. I thought about jotting it down just to see how close I was, but Karl would probably take care of that. He usually did, and his speeches were usually closer than mine.  
  
Onur wasn't buying Karl's suggestion. "Romefeller didn't have a problem with Benji," he insisted. "They may still hate our guts, but they liked Benji. Everyone liked Benji."  
  
I was a little surprised to hear Onur including himself in that "our." He was old White Fang too, a volunteer from L4; he just didn't usually like to admit it, seeing as how they were still an ornery bunch here at RCNP and Onur was hell-bent on adhering to the "reform process."  
  
"Everyone liked him except the administration who put him here."  
  
"Prescott liked him, Chang," he growled back. I rehashed the speech she'd be making soon and had to agree that she at least wanted it to look that way.  
  
"He's right," Karl chimed in. "As far as I can tell, that woman doesn't want any of us ever getting out of here. But even she couldn't resist that roguish charm of his."  
  
"Must be an L2 thing," I muttered, thinking of another former terrorist who had similar skills. "The guy was homeless before he signed up with White Fang. He had no family to speak of, no connections. The only thing he had going for him was his record in the first war, which was certainly impressive. He organized most of the L2 volunteers didn't he?"  
  
"Yes," Onur rumbled beside me. "I encountered him several times at the end, under Merquise. What are you getting at?"  
  
"Well, for those reasons he could have been deemed a serious threat to the new administration. He was an organizer and a leader. That's separate from the trouble he caused Romefeller during the war."  
  
"You're saying the blame for his death may not rest squarely on Romefeller's shoulders?" Karl tapped his pen against the bars a little quicker.  
  
"I'm saying it'd be stupid to rule out other interested parties."  
  
"He wasn't just a leader during the first Eve War; he was a leader here, too," Karl murmured. I could almost hear the gears turning.  
  
I jumped when Onur's large hand came down on my shoulder. He leveled a dark glare, but I knew it was tempered with worry, even if he didn't dare admit it. "What you two are suggesting is ludicrous and based solely on your paranoia. And it's dangerous if the wrong person hears you. You should shut your mouths before someone reports you." He gave me a hard shake and I shoved his arm away. "Before I do it myself."  
  
Turning my back on him, I went to the wall I shared with Karl's cell, leaning my back against the cinder blocks. I wasn't really in the mood for a lecture from Onur, though it appeared I was in for one anyway.  
  
"This is a rehabilitative center, Wufei." I knew he was serious when he used my given name. "We were placed here because our government trusts us to become better people. We're here so we can have a second chance at life."  
  
I'd heard those words so many times I wanted to gag. "We were put here to be de-clawed, to have our fangs blunted."  
  
"To have our wings clipped and our beaks cut," Karl added, voice pitched to carry.  
  
"This isn't a chicken farm, Karl," I growled.  
  
"Forgive me; I didn't think we were speaking literally."  
  
The wind now totally gone from my sails, I rolled my eyes and looked up when I heard a chuckle rumbling in Onur's chest. "You do have a way with words," he said.  
  
"Fuck you."  
  
"Although your eloquence comes and goes."  
  
I shook my head. "Look, please don't change the subject. Benji's dead Karl saw his body, and there obviously wasn't a struggle. If a bunch of  Romefeller flunkies went after him, we all would have heard it; there'd be blood everywhere. Benji would never have laid down for them. Maybe, there was some other reason maybe he was deemed a threat because of something else. Maybe he was a threat to someone else. He was-"  
  
"An ex-terrorist, just like you and me," Onur finished. "Just because you slept more soundly than usual doesn't mean-"  
  
"Gosh, I sure am hungry," Karl interrupted. "When's breakfast?"  
  
I turned to grip the bars, a sharp retort ready, just as a guard was approaching our cell, ordering the inmates back to their bunks as he went. "Please step away from the bars and return to your bunks until further notice. Breakfast will be delayed for at least an hour. Please return to your bunks, gentlemen." He came to our cell and our gazes met. "Get away from the bars, Wufei," he said. His name was Officer Brandt and I didn't think he liked me very much, though the way he spoke to me was never indicative of that.  
  
The guards who patrolled the cell blocks were not armed, or at least they claimed they were not. They always said 'please' and 'thank you' when they made requests. They didn't give orders and they called us gentlemen. But they also used our first names when they spoke to us, and that forced familiarity, the casual way they threw our names around made it feel like they owned us in a way their passive-aggressive orders did not. Even though they did not touch us, I felt like he had his fist in my collar when he used my given name.  
  
I stepped away from the bars, and he moved on, telling Karl to do the same. The sound of Karl's pen tapping the wall came through a second later in old Morse code. 'Talk later.' I tapped an affirmative before I climbed back up to my bunk, sliding under the blanket and pulling it up to my chin. It wasn't cold in the cell block. It would be warming up even more before long. Early summer in southern Italy was already hotter than I liked, and it made me think of the soothing airless black of space. Nataku was warm against my back, keeping away the chill in the cockpit. My nose and cheeks burned just a little with the cold. Hell, the apartment that Duo had found for me after the wars had been much more pleasant in terms of temperature, even if it did rain a lot. The cell block baked in the summer, and while the classrooms were air conditioned, we still had to spend a fair chunk of our days sitting in our own sweat.  
  
Right then I didn't care, as I rolled onto my side to see Onur already back in bed and asleep. If breakfast was pushed back, then the day hadn't officially started and we could all sleep longer. I felt chilled and sluggish, but there was no way I'd go back to sleep now. I rolled to my other side and stared at the wall, knowing Karl was in his bunk just a few feet away. He was usually so wired that only a few people could stand to be around him for more than fifteen minutes. Laying there, replaying our conversation and contemplating the dead body across the cell block, I understood how he felt. "They screwed up," I whispered. "Whoever wanted Benji dead, they shouldn't have drugged the insomniac across the hall. He would know."


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \--------------  
> A/N: Okay, here's my full disclaimer. This fic is about Wufei in a post-EW, post-war rehabilitative facility, 'rehab for terrorists' as he refers to it. It's not a prison, but neither is it voluntary. Seeing as I don't know much about prison or rehab, I'm making up this hybrid as I go along. I've given it a fair amount of thought, and its characteristics make sense to me, but I am very open to suggestions as to how to make the place more realistic/accurate/whatever. But I figure, hey, this is the future and and it's a brand new facility anyway, so an institution like this hasn't existed before. The point of the disclaimer is that I don't know much about these facilities, so please don't take offense if my knowledge and therefore my representation of the facility doesn't seem right.
> 
> Also, I'm using 1st person POV, past tense. Wufei is telling his story as well as those of the people around him, from the way he sees them. Hopefully it's not annoying.

"My brothers picked me up out of the rushes  
Handed me into the company of evil men  
But I've inched my way down the eastern seaboard  
I am coming to Atlanta again  
Yeah I came to the gates of the fabled pink city  
Hungry, and tired, and mad as all hell  
Swing low sweet jewel-encrusted chariot  
Make me young again  
Make me well"  
_-'Jaipur' Mountain Goats_  
  
"So... Wu, does it bug you that you're in the slammer and the rest of us are wandering around like idiots trying to figure out what we're supposed to do with our lives now that we can't blow shit up anymore?"  
  
I opened one eye and squinted up at him where he sat at the picnic table. He appeared to still be focused on his game of solitaire, sucking loudly on a lollipop and tapping the cards in his hand against the recycled plastic table.  
  
"'Cause, I mean, you seem pretty zen about it."  
  
I leaned up onto my elbows, ignoring the prickle of sharp grass on my forearms. My ass would be stained orange-red from the clay-filled dirt, too, and I tried not to think about the razzing I'd get from the laundry crew for that one. "Zen?"  
  
"Well, it still really bugs me," he continued, laying down a few cards and then neatening the piles, still not looking up. "And you just seem... I don't know; you seem okay with it."  
  
I laid back in the grass again, arms behind my head. "Don't worry, Duo, it bugs me on occasion, too."  
  
He either didn't notice my tone or he ignored it. "I mean, here you are, in the slammer, receiving punishment for crimes committed during the wars, as a terrorist, and the rest of us are knocking around, just as clueless as any of the supposed criminals in here, just as clueless as _everyone_ who fought those wars. Only difference is we stopped shooting a little sooner than you did."  
  
"There were a _few_ other things to consider."  
  
He shook his head and finally looked over at me. "Like what? The rest of us did just as much damage as you, and Heero ­ _way_ more. We've all killed innocents, caused billions of dollars in property damage, killed pacifist leaders, destroyed entire economies, and shit, we've all tried or at least thought about assassinating Relena on more than one occasion. And Quatre _invented_ the whole 'going Zero on your ass' freak out. _All_ _you did_ was blow some shit up a few days after we called it quits." He took the sucker out of his mouth and his words got a lot clearer. "And as much as I like that sweet jumpsuit you get to wear, I kinda miss having you on the outside."  
  
I looked down at the heavy cotton uniform that all the inmates wore. It was bluish gray and zipped up the front. In the hot afternoon sun, I'd shrugged out of the long sleeves and tied them around the waist to hold up the pants. I looked back at Duo and rolled my eyes. Half the time he showed up to visit me dressed the same way except covered in grease and grit, skin stained dark up to his elbows. When he flew in from L2, he was usually a little more presentable, but when he stayed in Rome with Trowa and Heero, he always found some odd job that got him dirty and disheveled. Today, his maroon work pants and the scent of engine oil, told me he'd been underneath a car directly before he got here.  
  
He was watching me carefully, and I got the sense there was something a bit more serious he wanted to discuss. Mid-July was coming, and that meant the remaining pilots would all visit at once, that we would sit together until dark, until visiting hours were over, and that Onur would sit up with me for the rest of the night. It'd happened last year on that day in mid-July; it would would happen again this year. Duo probably wanted to talk about that, but I wasn't quite ready, so I did something that Duo had always done well ­ I spoke without really communicating. I kept the conversation going.  
  
"I've noticed that you will take just about any opportunity to say 'in the slammer' and 'on the outside.' Why is that exactly?"  
  
His face split into a familiar grin. After nearly two years in Rehab for Terrorists and two years of war and very little friendship before that, I was willing to admit that I liked to see Duo smile. "You're my only friend in prison. I finally get to tell people, 'Yeah, Chang's still in the slammer.' It's sounds cool."  
  
"Glad I serve such an important function in your social life."  
  
He snorted. "Don't get bitter, little outlaw." I half-squinted, half-scowled up at him and he laughed, popping the sucker back in his mouth. "Anyway, I don't have a social life outside of you three guys. Since Relena decided to make you an example of her 'tough love for war criminals campaign,' my lack of social life is even sadder."  
  
He'd just extended the invitation to speak about the near future, about July 13th, and the fact that we were one fewer. 'The three of you,' said it loud and clear. But I looked away and stared up at the sky turned white with humidity and sun. If I looked straight up, I didn't see the razor wire encircling the high perimeter wall. Technically this was a rehabilitative facility, not a prison. We were being educated and trained to take respectable jobs and live decent lives after our sentences were up. We were not being punished, even though we were all criminals. But the fact remained that many of us were highly trained criminals who were required to stay in a place that would be relatively easy to escape. High walls and wire were not enough to keep many of us here. The assault rifles carried by the guards in the observation towers did that job with stunning efficacy.  
  
Finally I caved, easing in to what had to be said. Duo had voiced his objections to me being here many times. He didn't need to tell me again that he felt bad or that he was angry; he was getting at something deeper. "Duo," I started, "I don't remember us being friends before my trial. And we barely spoke to each other during the wars. So this, 'I miss having you on the outside,' seems groundless. You never had me 'on the outside.'"  
  
He was once again absorbed in his cards. "Details." He turned over a few and then added them to his piles, switching the sucker from one side of his mouth to the other. "But that's not entirely true. I found you a place to live after the Mariemaia incident. We were going to apply to-"  
  
"None of us were close, though, not even you and Heero, not really. It wasn't until I got here; it wasn't until..."  
  
I watched Duo's head hang lower between his shoulders. "...until after Quatre died," he finished. "I know. Two years this July for both of you."  
  
I sat up and pulled my knees to my chest. "Right." I rubbed my arms, trying to get rid of the goosebumps that had just risen. "Before then, I thought Quatre and Trowa might have pursued some kind of friendship and you and Heero seemed to get along..." Duo snorted and, looking decidedly morose, laid down a few more cards. "But we all split. After everything, there was no one else like us in the world and we still rejected any kind of relationship that might have..."  
  
"...kept Quatre from killing himself and kept you out of here." He took the sucker from his mouth again and looked over his shoulder at me. "Or at least put the rest of us in here with you."  
  
"Right," I said. "Though we would never have been together. Far too dangerous, even without Quatre to lead us."  
  
Duo turned, sliding one leg out from under the picnic table so that he straddled the bench. He picked at some dirt under his fingernail and abruptly crushed the sucker between his teeth. Chewing slowly and thoroughly, he looked like he was working through exactly what he'd wanted to say from the beginning.  
  
"What's bothering you, Duo?"  
  
He gave another humorless snort. "Aside from the obvious?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
He swung his other leg over the bench and set his elbows on his knees. His braid, cut a bit shorter now, hung half-way down his upper arm. He grabbed it in one fist and rubbed the length of hair against his chin. "I was thinking about how stupid we were, but at the same time, how we couldn't have really known any different. I mean, given all the evidence up through the Barton rebellion two years ago, we were invincible. No matter how many times Heero self-destructed, or how many times we got caught and imprisoned and tortured, no matter how many times we _tried_ to die, we didn't. We were a bunch of 15-year-old _gods_ , more or less!" He looked up, eyes wide, looking for me to agree with him. I nodded and he looked away again. "And then, _blammo_! You're tried and convicted for crimes during the second war and Quatre's... well he's...just gone, and suddenly, these great new lives we were supposed to have after the wars turned to complete _shit._ We were so stupid not to have noticed that there were only five of us to begin with. And now it's only Tro and me and Heero, and they're so firmly ensconced in Preventers, I barely get to see them out of uniform, which is probably the way they like it, knowing them. And you're the only one left who isn't afraid to make use of your facial muscles, and you're _here_ where I can only get to you, like, once a month!" He tossed his braid back over his shoulder and looked up at me. "So, that's what's bothering me."  
  
I quirked an eyebrow and tried to keep a lid on everything that threatened to spill out of my mouth right then. "I don't know," I managed. "That all sounds to me like it should go under the 'obvious' heading."  
  
He was off the bench and kneeling in front of me so fast I barely had time to lean away from the fist he made in my t-shirt. "Don't be an ass," he hissed. "I'm trying to say something important."  
  
"Then tell me something I _don't_ know."  
  
With him right in my face like that, I noticed smudges of dirt across his cheeks and in a line across his forehead where the brim of a cap must have been. His eyes, a strange color that I'd never been able to categorize, wavered from mine. They slid to the side and then back. "I think you ending up here and Quatre ending up dead happened just a little too close to each other. We were caught completely off guard, and maybe that's how it was supposed to happen. There ­ how's that grab you?"  
  
"You think the two are connected?" I asked, and I think I startled him with my straight face. His eyebrows dipped down for a moment and then lifted. He shook his head.  
  
"I don't know what I think about it. I do know the charges brought against you were pushed through quicker than any war crimes trial I've ever heard of. I know _none_ of us saw it coming, especially because we thought Une would go to the mat for you. And I know Quatre was ready to in her place."  
  
"I'm aware of how far he would have gone for me," I murmured. "But the amount of pressure he was under from his family and from his job..." It was a well-worn explanation of what'd brought him to that desperate point one week before my sentence was to start, when we'd found him...  
  
"Chang, he _thrived_ on that shit. His family and his work drove him."  
  
My throat was dry and the place where his fist pressed against my chest was starting to ache. "Duo- let's just leave it for now, okay? I have a meeting with Rorty in a few minutes and visiting hours are almost over."  
  
He didn't move right away, keeping hold of my shirt and not letting me look away. Then he glanced to the side and stiffened. "Yeah, the man's on his way now. I better hit the road." He let go of my shirt and hauled me to my feet, swiping some of the dust from my pants. I took a steadying breath and a step back, feeling a bit more shaken up than I thought I should. But Duo wasn't done, and before the guard got within earshot, he pulled me into a hard hug and spoke quickly into my ear. "You need to be incredibly careful here, buddy. _Always_ watch your back, and don't let any of these punks near you. We already lost you part of the way; we can't lose you like we did Quatre. We have to see this shit coming from now on."  
  
"I can take care of myself, Duo," I replied. "I have so far."  
  
"Yeah, well, keep that big geeky roommate of yours close by, okay? He may not like you very much ­ and who can blame the guy? ­ but he's larger than you and he's watchin' out for you, and that's what matters here."  
  
I wanted to tell him that the few who'd tried to mess with me because of my size and appearance had quickly realized their mistake, but that would have only worried him more. What he didn't know about this place couldn't hurt him. And after nearly two years of visits from friends that I didn't think I really deserved, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt them with stories about my problems. A gust of wind blew across the yard, kicking up dust and generally feeling like a blast furnace. We both staggered a bit and shielded our eyes. My hair, after having been shaved upon my admission to the facility wasn't long enough to pull into more than a feeble tail which did nothing to keep it out of my eyes. I gathered it off my face with a growl and held it back with my hand, pausing when I saw Duo giving me a crooked smile.  
  
"What."  
  
"I just realized I got you a present, Wu."  
  
I blinked. "You did?"  
  
"Yeah. Don't say I never brought you anything." Then he pulled a grimy red bandanna from his back pocket and went down on one knee to fold it into a wide band about four inches across. It was streaked with oil and dirt and probably sweat. When he straightened to give it to me, I hesitated to touch it. But he just grinned at me and shoved it into my hand. "That'll work to keep the hair off your face, won't it?"  
  
"Duo, it's filthy."  
  
"Yeah, so wash it."  
  
I looked down at the neatly folded piece of cloth and then back up to Duo, then to the guard hovering behind him. "Thank you," I murmured.  
  
Duo glanced over his shoulder and made a soft hissing sound, quickly looking back to me. Unsurprisingly, Duo and authority figures didn't go well together. He tried to avoid them whenever he could, but our conversation had run long today. He forced a smile, though, and we said our goodbyes. "So, I'll see you in a few weeks, big guy. I wouldn't miss the old 18th birthday for the world." I nodded and he clapped me on the shoulder. "I'll be sure to buy you a pack of smokes now that you're of legal age." I snorted a laugh and Duo snickered along with me at the absurdity of the statement. Two years ago, I had been piloting a multi-ton Gundam, leveling military bases and destroying enemy spacecraft. But I couldn't buy cigarettes or vote. I still couldn't do the former and now I would never be able to do the latter.  
  
With another pat and a quick squeeze of my shoulder, he turned and neatly stepped around the waiting guard. He shoved his hands in his pockets, a sign that I'd learned meant he wasn't happy, and walked quickly to the exit, where he was patted down and then allowed to leave. Just before he disappeared around the corner, I saw him reach behind his head to scratch his scalp with his middle finger. I smirked even though he was gone and couldn't see my reaction.  
  
With a glance up at the sun, I judged that it was just about time for my meeting with Rorty, the prison psychiatrist, and since the whether was nice, he'd want to meet outside. He was probably already at the basketball courts from his previous counseling session. Another hot blast of hair rushed up against my back, blowing short, infuriating strands of hair into my face. I held them back with one hand and looked down at the folded bandanna in the other. Personalizing our uniforms was permitted ­ it was a kind of controlled individuality that the staff approved of. I wouldn't catch much grief for changing my appearance just slightly, but the gift still made me nervous. It was red and dirty, but so long as not many people knew it came from him, I should be okay. Bad enough that I had three good friends who came to visit me regularly ­ more than most of the inmates ­ but wearing things that they gave me was like a sign on my forehead that I needed them, that I wasn't strong enough on my own without them.  
  
I didn't feel like dealing with that particular notion, even though I'd had my suspicions about it for some time. Lucky for me, if anyone else did, too, or they felt like calling me out on it, they learned quickly that in terms of physical ability, I had at least that in spades.  
  
Duo wouldn't have known the risks of giving me something like this, but not wearing it, especially when my hair at its awkward length was such a pain in the ass, would only make him worry more. So I turned my face into the wind and tied the folded bandanna at the base of my skull. I smoothed down the strands that stuck out at odd angles underneath the strip of cloth and then headed for the basketball courts.  
  
+  
  
"That a present from one of your war buddies?" he asked casually, driving toward the hoop and neatly laying the ball off the backboard through the net. I caught the ball and dribbled back to half court. Rorty waited at the foul line. I knew he'd seen it, noted it, the second I arrived for our meeting. It was his job to notice things like that, but it still made me twitchy. I was a horrible liar, though, so I figured innocent truth was all I could offer.  
  
"Duo gave it to me today because the wind was blowing hair in my face."  
  
"It looks pretty dirty."  
  
"He's a dirty guy. I'll wash it with the rest of my laundry." I paused and swallowed. "If that's okay." He noticed the effort and grinned his guilty approval. He claimed to hate the hierarchical code of etiquette as much as I did. I tended to believe him.  
  
"Sure it's okay, Chang. I think it's incredibly important to have friends with a positive influence."  
  
That was the qualifier right there. I had yet to figure out whether they considered Duo a positive influence or not.  
  
"Sometimes I really worry that Prescott is trying to completely homogenize everyone here. I mean, I know her heart is in the right place and that she wants the best for everybody, but I'm of the opinion that you can't force people to be a certain way. They're going to be who they will be."  
  
This was a familiar conversation. Rorty loved to tell me how he supported individuality and honing specialized skills and pursuing what we're passionate about. After two years of meetings with him, I got the feeling that he needed to say it to reassure himself that he was still working at the Rehabilitation Center for New Pacifism for the right reasons, that he at least kept in mind the original goals of the place. I knew for a fact that he still believed in those goals: rehabilitation and training for war criminals so that we may reenter the working world as constructive, stable, skilled and yes, even happy members of society. We may have lost our most fundamental political rights, but education, social welfare, contract, even freedom of assembly and the press are guaranteed to us upon our exit. I know he believed that neither the Earth Sphere nor the Colonies could stand to lose an entire generation of men and women to the wars, so the work he did here had to mean a lot to him.  
  
And Sally Po vouched for him before my sentence started. They hadn't known each other during the war, but he was in that same network of rebels. He was about the same age, too. I could have just as easily encountered him instead of Sally. So, I knew his heart was in it, and I knew that he knew how important it was to not treat old soldiers like criminals.  
  
Didn't mean he was my best friend, however. And it didn't mean I liked to talk about my best friends with him. Nor did his openness about his frustrations with Prescott mean that I could express mine. She could see the transcripts of these meetings if she wanted to, and I never forgot the little tape recorder busily whirring away on the bench by Rorty's towel.  
  
"I'm- assuming you've heard from my Literature teacher," I volunteered, eager for a change of subject. He acknowledged it with a small nod.  
  
"Your attention and participation have dropped over the last few months," he said, attempting to block my advance on the hoop. I spun away but he stuck to me. "Why do you think that is?"  
  
"I don't find the class particularly challenging. I've read all the books assigned this semester. And the woman teaching it is-"  
  
"Ah, yes," he laughed, reaching around to try and steal the ball from me. I shouldered him out of the way and made an easy lay up. "She says you're an unnecessarily short-tempered misogynist."  
  
I barked a laugh. "So it's only the short-tempered part that's unnecessary?"  
  
"Chang..." I could tell that he was grinning at me. He grabbed the rebound and I saw that he was. In the two years I'd been here, I'd never thanked him for using my surname, rather than my given name. It was a vital bit of respect he afforded the inmates that no other official did. "That teacher puts up with a lot. You should be more respectful and grateful that she's willing to deal with a bunch of ornery men and a bitter kid like you."  
  
I stiffened.  
  
"Don't give me that offended look, Chang; you're only seventeen." He dribbled back to half court and stayed there, stalling. I waited for him to voice what he obviously wanted to talk about.  
  
"I've been asking all the others who see me whether they want to talk about Bennett," he said finally. "Most have found that expressing their grief over his death has been helpful to them. Is there anything you'd like to say? I know that you and he were friends."  
  
I scowled at the ground even though my heart rate had just jumped. "We played cards some when Karl invited me. I didn't know him well. I thought he was an honorable, if misguided person." I looked up. "During the war, I mean."  
  
He smiled sadly at me. "I liked him, too... definitely a mean poker player."  
  
"Have you determined yet who killed him?" I held my breath as he ran a frustrated hand through close-cut brown hair.  
  
"We've got our suspicions, but from everyone I've talked to in session, no one's hinted at anything. Those formerly of Romefeller seem the most uncomfortable, but they're keeping quiet." I was surprised he'd said even that much to me.  
  
"I would have thought we'd hear a struggle," I ventured. "If somehow, somebody got into his cell, we should have heard the fight."  
  
His dribbled the ball a little harder. "Not to mention, _how_ someone got into the cell. They would have needed access to the main computer to open the door. Some of the staff are thinking now that maybe he did it himself, since the knife was still in his room with his prints on it. But I can't believe Benji would do something like that. He was too..." He trailed off.  
  
"Ornery?" I supplied.  
  
"Exactly," he laughed. "Well, I shouldn't be talking about how the administration is royally bungling the investigation, so we should probably get down to business now, don't you think?" I straightened my shoulders on cue and nodded. "So, what do you think you can do to be more attentive and productive in your class?"  
  
My day got a lot less interesting at that point.


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

We do what we do  
All for you  
All dressed up  
Black hat and white cane  
Slowly the circling the drain  
Ready for the future  
Ready for the world about to come  
We are what we are  
Get in the goddamn car  
Smiling faces flawlessly rehearsed  
We are sleek and beautiful  
We are cursed  
_\--Slow West Vultures_  
  
I tried not to limp on my way back from the laundry room, keeping one arm firmly around my ribs, the other hand tightly gripping Duo's red bandanna. My hair was, of course, in my face, but it hid my bloody lip, so I let it stay there until I recognized my cell and shuffled through the open door. Curfew was in a few minutes, so they would all be sliding shut and locking soon.  
  
I didn't look up, but I knew Onur was already in his bunk, probably practicing trig problems. I went straight to the sink and dropped the bandanna into it, turning on the faucet and watching the water run pink as it swirled down the drain. Good thing the piece of cloth was already red, or it would stain. I let go of my ribs and rang it out, crumpling it up in a tight ball and sitting it on the edge. Then I leaned down and stuck my mouth under the faucet. I took a few swallows and then swished more over my teeth and gums. When I spit, it also came out pink. Running my tongue over the split in my lip, I decided it wasn't too bad.  
  
I felt Onur moving behind me and straightened slowly, grabbing up the bandanna and holding it against my lip. I wasn't surprised when I turned and saw my roommate standing directly behind me. Still, I took a step back and came up against the sink.  
  
"What," I mumbled.  
  
"It was over that stupid hair band, wasn't it."  
  
I looked over his shoulder. Karl walked by the door on his way to his cell and conspicuously leaned back to get a better look at what was going on inside ours. I glared at him and he kept moving. "Among other things," I answered.  
  
"Just stop wearing it. It's given you nothing but trouble the past week."  
  
It'd been a particularly hot day, so even though the night brought cooler air, it had yet to filter down inside the cell blocks. Onur smelled like sweat and, coming from the boiling hot laundry room, I knew I did too. Without responding to him, I refolded the bandanna and pulled the hair off my face with it, tying it at the base of my skull. The cold damp of the cloth felt good.  
  
"It's practical and comfortable in hot weather," I muttered. "I won't stop wearing it because someone found out Duo gave it to me. Those Romefeller punks were looking for an excuse to fight me again."  
  
He crossed his arms over his barrel chest. "How perfect that you gave them one. And how did they fare this time?"  
  
The side of my mouth that wasn't bruised quirked up in a smirk. "About as well as last time. But they brought friends who had better luck getting me on the ground. It helped that there were six of them." I decided I would wait until lights out to change into my sleeping clothes, not wanting him to see my ribs or my knee. I didn't really want to look at them either. "It was a good fight. I think O'Malley and Basker will have to find some new lackies to tackle me when I'm alone in the laundry next time."  
  
"You know you'll only have more trouble with Prescott with these fights you get into. You're not making sufficient progress in the program, Chang; your sentence could be extended."  
  
"And you know as well as I do that the fights I get into prevent lots more fights from ever happening. I win those fights to protect myself."  
  
"I know that, I know," he said. "I just think that you could be making more of an effort to stick with the program, to keep your head down and focus on your studies. Your teacher approached me again today to tell me that you haven't been participating in class and that you've been rude to her when she's tried to draw you in to the discussion."  
  
I rolled my eyes. "Gah, she's been talking to you, too? I got it from Rorty the other day at our meeting."  
  
"Yes, he told me to try and talk to you about it as well."  
  
I felt like stamping my foot and screaming at the ceiling. "Why is everyone so concerned with my participation in English class? We're reading Dickens... Dickens! I have nothing to say about Charles Dickens."  
  
"You don't want to talk about your class?" he growled. "That's fine; how about the fact that you haven't been coming to any of the support groups, or outdoor recreation time? You always used to play soccer with us."  
  
We heard tapping on my wall and turned to listen as Karl added his two cents. 'Chang is a punk.'  
  
Onur pressed his mouth into a tight smile. "He's got it right."  
  
I clenched my jaw until it ached. "They're optional programs, and I participated for the first year--and--a--half I was here. I don't need grief counseling or aggression therapy, and I get plenty of physical exercise on my own. I don't need what they offer."  
  
He scowled. "You--"  
  
"And I don't want to talk about this anymore. Can we please leave the discussion at the part where you think I'm a pain in the ass who isn't worth the thousands of tax--payer dollars spent on me?"  
  
He gave me his best 'I'm disappointed in you' glare and turned away to climb back into his bunk. Wearily, I struggled up into my own, dragging off the coveralls and draping them over the metal bedpost. I lay there in my t--shirt and boxer shorts and rested my fingers along my ribs. My heart was still thudding with adrenalin and my knuckles still ached pleasantly. I ran my tongue over the split in my lip and tasted metal. It wasn't smart to accept gifts, much less wear them openly; it basically amounted to Duo staking a claim and not being able to back it up. Others had tried to fill that role in the past two years and they'd all failed. I didn't need protection, and I didn't want it. My friends were probably making my life more dangerous by visiting, Trowa and Heero especially when they showed up in their Preventer jackets. Right then, I didn't give a fuck. Let Romefeller posture and pick their occasional fights. They kept me in shape.  
  
I rolled onto my side when I caught Karl's faint, muted tapping. I could barely hear it, and I hoped Onur was asleep enough to not be woken by the sound. 'You okay?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
'Tomorrow at lunch?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
+  
  
Karl was shifty and nervous. He glanced over his shoulder a lot and pushed his floppy blond hair out of his eyes every time it fell forward. It fell forward every time he got excited. And judging by how wide his pale blue eyes were, he had a lot to be excited about. I watched him, mildly amused and hoping that the guards watching the yard saw nothing out of the ordinary in his level of twitchiness. As Karl had put it, we were "on a caper" even though we sat at our usual picnic table at the edge of the yard, under the small bit of shade provided by a spindly olive tree. I sat across from him and tried to figure out when the two of us had become friends.  
  
During the war, Karl Bergsen had been one of Treize's most loyal followers. The kid had done everything in his considerable power to advance his leader's ruthless form of diplomacy. He kept his hands clean in MS design and manufacturing, but he was a zealot who'd taken countless lives without punching a single button or pulling a trigger. I'd seen his name on many a mission list, and if there'd been time, I'm sure his name would have eventually made it far enough along Yuy or Barton's assassination queue that he wouldn't be sitting here with me. But he went down hard after the first Eve War. The new regime was justifiably leery of his skills and his steadfast loyalty to Treize. He was here when I got here, and he would be here after I left in another year. The civilized world was not ready for Karl Bergsen, and I guess I couldn't blame them for wanting to keep him locked up a few years longer than most. He was smarter than Rehab for Terrorists wanted him to be and he still had MS schematics flickering through his brain as much as they tried to numb him with accounting classes. He still believed that there was a place for people like us -- one that didn't involve trying to convert us into something else.  
  
He was a still a little on the creepy side; his eyes hadn't lost that manic gleam in the few years he'd been here. But he'd become a little smarter about who he trusted -- which has made our friendship even stranger because I didn't see how he could consider me trustworthy, unless he really didn't know that I'd been the one to kill his precious leader. Maybe someday I would tell him, the day I was leaving -- from a pay phone somewhere.  
  
Just what was and wasn't known about the Gundam Pilots has remained fuzzy, especially here. All those in Mariemaia's army knew that I'd piloted Altron, but the details of the first Eve War, aside from Duo's televised capture were kept from the public. Knowledge of what I'd done during that war would probably lead to a swift and untimely death for me -- perhaps one similar to Benji's.  
  
Despite his oddness and the very real danger I could be in if he found out exactly who I was, I liked Karl. And I had since I saw him take on three old Alliance men in a fight he had no hope of winning. They were all bigger than him and clearly had more combat experience, but he handled himself well against both their insults and their fists. I could never abide weakness and so I never thought I would identify with the underdog in a fight, but the way Karl fought -- he was different; and he certainly wasn't weak. Every now and then he looked at me with such complete focus and attention, I swore it was Quatre blinking at me with eyes just a little too pale, and hair a shade too dark. I sincerely hoped that his resemblance to Quatre was not the reason I considered him a friend, but, as has been the case with many questions I've had over the years, I wasn't entirely certain.  
  
"So, what do you think, Boss? Hear anything new and interesting? Anything good come down the wire?"  
  
I shrugged my arms out of the jumpsuit sleeves and tied them around my waist, already sweating though we'd been out here for only a few minutes. "Not a lot," I grumbled, watching him light a cigarette with a flimsy cardboard match. He flicked it into the dirt without extinguishing it and I watched it gutter, catch a few blades of grass on fire and then go out. "You're going to burn this place down if you're not careful."  
  
He grinned, giving me a quick glimpse at the broken and missing teeth on the left side of his mouth -- a result of one of the first fights he'd gotten himself into upon his arrival. When he smiled, he didn't look at all like Quatre. "That's the plan, Boss." He took a few drags on the cigarette and watched me expectantly. "Well? You haven't found anything?"  
  
"Why are you calling me 'Boss?'"  
  
He shrugged. "Something new and different."  
  
I think my mouth probably twitched because he grinned again. "No -- I haven't really found out much. Onur isn't talking and neither are his White Fang friends."  
  
"They've always been a surly bunch, though. Onur's the only one amongst them who can form a grammatically correct sentence."  
  
I raised an eyebrow. "That's not very nice."  
  
He sucked on his cigarette. "Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't realized I was supposed to be."  
  
"Have you ever been to L2 -- or any of the other White Fang recruitment centers for that matter? Most of the rebels were starving and desperate for a way to fight. If any one of them--"  
  
He waved his hand in my face and stuttered a perfunctory apology. "Sorry, sorry. Prep school, OZ recruit talking. Have no humanity left. Bourgeois pig. Can we continue?"  
  
I rolled my eyes and wondered why I had felt the need to stick up for the L2 population at all. Onur wasn't even from there.  
  
"Hear anything from Romefeller, or your own cohort?"  
  
I shook my head. "No one in Mariemaia's army ever spoke to me and I think Romefeller likes me even less. Considerably less, actually. But from what I can judge in my lit class and and the mess hall, they're spooked. They seem surprised that they're under suspicion for Benji's murder."  
  
Karl looked up at the scraggly branches of the olive tree. "Pinning it on them was a good way to take them down a notch. You want a sense of entitlement? Romefeller thought they were owed the world."  
  
"At my meeting with Rorty, he made it sound like the staff suspects them of being behind it, though he also said that some of the staff think it was suicide. The ones who did it would have had to be able to get into the cell first, which means they needed access to the computer."  
  
"Or someone coaxed him to the bars before grabbing him."  
  
I shrugged, frustrated. "It's impossible to know anything when there were no witnesses."  
  
"None that are talking, anyway."  
  
"And it's not like the staff will simply tell us what we want to know if we ask."  
  
"Rorty seemed willing to talk about it with you."  
  
I shook my head. "He's... not like other people on the staff. Though, maybe he was fishing for what I knew."  
  
"Hn."  
  
We sat in silence for awhile after that, the summer heat a physical weight on my shoulders and the back of my neck. Karl smoked furiously, eyes darting about the yard. Every minute or so he twitched the hair out of his face. Thus far, this wasn't much of a caper.  
  
"So your big birthday celebration is coming next week, right?" I nodded. "All three of your friends showing up?"  
  
"That's right."  
  
He flicked the cigarette into the dirt and watched a few more pieces of grass burn. "How old will you be?"  
  
"Eighteen." He nodded and then drew one leg up to his chest, resting his chin on his knee. Right then he looked so much like Quatre, I had to look away.  
  
"Hey, don't be sad, Chang. Eighteen isn't old. You're just a young thing." He started bouncing his leg, making his head bob along with it. "Look at me; I'm 21, practically an old man."  
  
"You can at least buy a drink."  
  
"Yes I can, though I haven't been able to since I came of age." He flicked hair out of his eyes. "You don't strike me as the drinking sort."  
  
"I'm not," I grumbled. "But it's the principle of the thing. I was--"  
  
"I know, Chang. You were in that gundam when you were 16."  
  
And a ways before that, I finished silently. "Right," I said.  
  
"You're lucky to have friends who visit so often. There wasn't a party for me when I turned 18... or 21." That first birthday had been before I arrived, but the second -- it was true. No one came to see him, and the only event to mark the occasion was an especially brutal fight with his usual bullies. I didn't know what to say to him about it, and the moment of awkward silence ended when his eyes twitched away from mine and focused on some point in middle distance.  
  
"You could-- you could come and meet them if you wanted to, when they're here. I think you would like Duo. Heero and Trowa are pretty inept, but--"  
  
"That's okay," he interrupted, looking shiftier than usual. "I don't do too well with new people, these days, and they don't do too well with me."  
  
I huffed a laugh and he glanced up, startled. "These days? You're 21, not 81. What days are you talking about? You're bizarre and moderately anti--social, but so are two of my three best friends." For another second or two, his eyes slid uneasily from me to the four observation towers and then back. Karl didn't like to be caught off guard any more than the rest of our fellow criminals. Then his shoulders twitched upward in a shrug.  
  
"Maybe I'll stop over."  
  
I gestured grandly around the yard. "We'll be out in the garden if the weather is nice. If it should rain, we will retire to the parlor."  
  
Karl gave his sharp laugh. "Is that the third or fourth card table from the TV that only plays game shows and the gardening network?"  
  
"The fourth -- the one with the leg that Onur fixed using only Elmer's glue, construction paper and sequins from the craft table."  
  
"Oh, right, that parlor." He laughed again and so did I. I hoped he would choose to meet the others when they came for my birthday. Duo would enjoy his sense of humor. Heero could probably talk mecha with him all day, and Trowa, if he could get past Karl's resemblance to Quatre, would probably like him for his twitchiness because Trowa was pretty twitchy himself, although he was better at hiding it than Karl.  
  
I realized, after a moment, that Karl's attention had been drawn elsewhere -- most likely inward -- as he sat across from me and stared at the table, subconsciously fingering his pack of cigarettes. I turned away to leave him to his thoughts and watched the soccer game taking place across the yard. I could make out Onur's big frame guarding the goal, hand raised to his mouth to call out encouragement. The scene before me was suddenly so familiar and immediate that I had a difficult time envisioning what it would be like when my three friends arrived together in a few days. I couldn't picture them here with me -- Duo trying to get me to care about his latest salvage mission, Heero struggling just to communicate with any of us, Trowa's sharp tongue and cold exterior masking and distorting the very real concern he had for all of us, the vacant seat none of us would look at. I could guess at how it would go, but I couldn't make out the details of any of them, not in the face of the tangible circumstances before me -- Karl's sandy colored hair that he didn't wash as often as he should, the shouts of the men playing soccer, many of them speaking languages I didn't know, the tension in the air as all of them struggled to determine their place in a world that had deemed them too dangerous to be out in it. I thought that maybe this was exactly where I belonged.  
  
Then Karl raised his head and our gazes met across the table as he came back to the present. "What were you thinking about?" I asked, well aware of how bold a question it was and how much that didn't seem to matter here.  
  
"I was thinking about the third parlor where Benji used to get some great poker games going. And he could turn anything into an excuse for a bet -- even those stupid garden shows. He'd think of some way to get a wager going about how much they'd spend on shrubs and mulch."  
  
"I never took part in those," I sniffed.  
  
"You should have," he said. "They were hysterical. I'm really going to miss them." He pulled another cigarette from his pack and deftly lit it, cupping his hand around the match. "I was thinking that we should keep trying to figure out why he was murdered." I looked down at my hands. "And I was thinking we should really try to figure out why our food was drugged the night it happened."  
  
My eyes flew back up to his. "I was thinking we should find out why Romefeller took the blame for the murder when it was Prescott herself who ordered that we all be put down for the night. We should find out whether some staff member did the deed or had one of us do it, for some reason that we should also find out." He took the cigarette from his mouth and blew a stream of smoke up into the branches. "That's what I was thinking about."  
  
In the few weeks since Benji's death, Karl and I had speculated about the prison staff's involvement. We both thought that, given Benji's life here -- just how many friends he had and how well he could pull hesitant inmates, men who'd fought bitterly against White Fang, into his circle -- the administration would have an interest in controlling and maybe even silencing him to keep him from exerting more of an influence over us. But speculation and suspicion were one thing...  
  
"Karl, where exactly did you stumble upon the information that Presott ordered sedatives put in our food."  
  
He shrugged sharply. "Who else could it have been?"  
  
"Anyone who works in the kitchen," I answered quickly. "We all have kitchen duties -- it could have been anybody who had a chance to slip something into the ingredients."  
  
He shook his head. "I spoke with the man who did it. And he said he got his orders from Prescott."  
  
"Okay," I started, "but why would your source want to share this with you -- an inmate and a friend of Benji's? Who is he?"  
  
Karl waved his cigarette and from the light in his eyes, I knew this was what he'd been so excited about from the moment we sat down. "It doesn't matter who it is, and I wouldn't tell you anyway."  
  
We stared each other down until he finally looked away, puffing on his cigarette and bouncing his knee under his chin. "Karl... was it a guard or some other staff person who told you this, or one of us?" He started to rub his arms, cigarette dangling from his lips, and didn't answer. "I don't need to know who specifically told you, but if--"  
  
"If what?" he snapped. "Are you concerned over the validity of the information, or is this some half--baked effort at caring about how I got it?"  
  
In the two years I'd known him, Karl was always looking for something -- attention, acknowledgment, excitement, something interesting, something dangerous, affection or fulfillment -- something that would scratch and satisfy him in a way that his life up until then had not. He was smarter than everyone here, and when in that position, without an equal, he only had his own head for company. But even that, especially that, got boring. I thought that was why he wanted me around, and probably why he said something like that.  
  
"Half--baked?" He sucked hard on his cigarette and now, wouldn't look away. I took the bait. "Karl, what happened? What did you have to do to get this person to tell what he did?"  
  
He gave me a manic grin. "Nothing outrageous. Nothing that wasn't worth what I got. Chang, we're onto something big, here, something really exciting! I know you see it. We were all knocked out while one of our friends was killed -- murdered! What would you give to know why it happened, or whether it's going to happen again? Wouldn't you give anything to know exactly why Quatre Winner died, to know why, one week before your sentence started, he ended up dead at his desk?"  
  
"Quatre killed himself," I murmured, only half--listening now. I could feel the color draining from my face in a rush. I didn't think just speaking of his death would have such an affect after nearly two years. It usually didn't. I thought about Quatre a lot. But no one else spoke of him, and when they did, well... "He was under a lot of pressure at his job, and he was still working on my case. He didn't..." I trailed off. I forced myself out of the track of memory that led inexorably to finding him in his office, Duo's frantic shouts for help, feeling his throat for a pulse and finding his skin still warm with residual life.  
  
I caught the sharp, bitter smell of tobacco smoke and remembered how to breath. I looked up to find Karl holding his cigarette under my nose, expression deadly serious. He was sweating and nervous and obviously excited. "You see it, right? You see what we could do with the fact that the people who are supposed to be helping us are drugging us. They're at least complicit in the murder of one of our friends."  
  
"We don't know that for sure. The two aren't necessarily connected."  
  
He shook his head. "But you see it, don't you. You see what this could be. And it might not even be the first."  
  
I was still remembering the sound Duo had made when he'd found-- "Not the first?"  
  
"Yes! You remember Vasil, right?"  
  
"I'm not sure -- maybe."  
  
"He might have been before your time; I'll check. But he was one of the first anti--Alliance colonist rebels -- stodgiest old curmudgeon you'll ever meet... except you won't meet him because he got knifed in the showers about two years ago. He was one of the few real leaders here, and he was--"  
  
"I don't think I can talk about this anymore today, Karl." That was my second effort to avoid an important conversation in two days. Was this becoming a habit?  
  
He flicked his cigarette away and twitched the hair out of his eyes, not seeming too concerned. "Fine, fine. But you see it, right? This is something we have to follow."  
  
I realized I was trying to dig my fingernails into hard plastic and forced myself to relax. "Yes I see it, but if there is some insidious plot at work here, if Benji and Vasil were killed for political reasons, then you and I have to be so careful where and with whom we talk about this. And you see that, right? If any of the staff catches wind of the fact that we're nosing around in their business, we could be--"  
  
"It stays between the two of us, at least on the inside. There's no one we can trust here. Not your roommate, not Rorty -- no one." He stopped and was looking at me strangely. I replayed what he just said.  
  
"'At least on the inside?' You know some outside who'd help us with this?"  
  
He looked away and started tapping his fingers on the table, thinking about another cigarette probably. "My only friends are here," he said finally. "Everyone else just put me here."  
  
I rarely saw his bitterness in the open like that, but when it surfaced, I could feel that it was bone deep. "Most of my friends are Preventers, so they're not really the ones to ask. At least not yet," I offered. While I knew that Heero and Trowa would dive right into this sort of investigation, both because they were more dedicated to the peace than anyone I knew and because my safety was potentially at risk, I didn't think I could go to them with it, not when their badges were still so new and they were still feeling out their positions. The same went for Sally. Une was just too... unpredictable. I didn't trust Merquise at all and probably never would, which meant I couldn't trust Noin either. Relena would definitely want to know if her pet program was screwing up its participants rather than helping them -- if it was in fact killing them -- but she already had more on her plate than she could handle. If there really was something sinister going on, we'd need more than Karl's conspiracy theories before we went to her. That left Duo -- freelance Preventer, sweeper, mechanic, former thief and terrorist with serious authority issues. Pretty much every chance he got, Duo expressed his dismay and outrage at the fact that only I was being punished for what we had all done during the wars. Duo had always been a wild card among wild cards. For almost the entire span of the first war, I had considered him a liability -- he was too reckless and brash and loud to be of any use as an ally, let alone a partner. But I had learned that counting him as one of my few friends meant that I could trust him absolutely. I looked Karl in the eye and gave him a tight smile. "I know someone who might be willing to help us."


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

thanks you for the puppy.  
thank you for the lamp.  
thanks for the books.  
thanks for the filing cabinet  
I don't know what I did without it.  
  
thank you for coming by.  
it's nice to see you once in a while.  
thank you for the coat I forgot to mention.  
I've been freezing in here.  
I've been freezing in here.  
_\--"Sorry, I can't" m.g._  
  
The four of us sat together at one of the tables in the common room, the fourth one from the TV that only played game shows and the gardening network. They didn't sing 'Happy Birthday,' first of all because I didn't want them to, and second because Heero flatly refused to do it anyway. From last year's experience, they knew I didn't like soda, so Duo brought juice. They brought cupcakes because, again from last year's experience, they learned that they couldn't bring a cake -- too much space in which to hide contraband. I'd ended up with a mush of cake crumbs and icing by the time they'd gotten it to me. The whole occasion was too depressing for words at that point in my life, still facing at least two more years here, and they promised to have it figured out for next year.  
  
They were as good as their word, as I knew they would be. The store--bought cupcakes' tamper--proof seal had been broken, but the cupcakes themselves were in tact; the guards tasted the juice to make sure it wasn't spiked; and their gifts were examined before hand. They hadn't bothered with wrapping paper this time.  
  
They all held their presents behind their backs and gave them to me one at a time, while I eyed the cupcakes and wondered when we would get to eat them. Heero handed me his first -- a stack of history books, both pre-- and post--colony.  
  
"Those are okay, right?" he asked. "They would want you to know history, especially if you're taking literature classes."  
  
I nodded, looking through the titles. "Much safer than the revolutionary manifestos you brought me last year."  
  
He shrugged. "I should have known that they'd be confiscated." I looked up at him and saw a year--old hurt in his eyes over that one. He'd wanted me, I think, to have that collection of writings as a sort of peace offering. My seventeenth birthday was only the second time I'd seen him since we'd fought on that very last day and he'd dropped into the ocean. I'd been fighting for both of us, for all five of us, for every soldier who had been cast aside after the first war ended. He'd wanted me to see why others had fought as well, and why he would continue to do so but for a very different purpose than mine.  
  
The first time I'd seen him after the second Eve War was at Quatre's funeral.  
  
"I thought you and Barton were saving a place for me with Preventers," I said finally. "These lit classes are just for show, aren't they?"  
  
Heero shrugged again and looked away. "For your own edification, then, or if you change your mind."  
  
Trowa handed his gift to me next and it was a science fiction series that I didn't know. "The best politics are always in science fiction; it's pretty subversive stuff," he said in his flat tone. "The first one is about a group of children taken out into space to be trained for battle. They were supposed to be child--officers in a gigantic fleet headed into deep space to fight off an alien race that threatened to wipe them out. I think it's right up your alley."  
  
"Sounds like it. I'm surprised they let you bring these to me."  
  
Trowa smirked. "It's not so obviously subversive."  
  
I got a bony elbow in my ribs. "Oi, oi, lemme give you mine, Wu. I'm tired of holding this stuff." Duo, who'd been sitting quietly next to me then proceeded to dump a pile of cigarettes and porn into my lap.  
  
I looked down at it and then up at him to see a grin stretched from ear to ear. "Maxwell..." I started. "This is--"  
  
He laughed. "It's your birthright! At the age of eighteen you are legally allowed to purchase smokes and porno, but since you're here and are thus unable to claim your birthright, I thought I'd bring the goods to you." He rummaged through the pile in my lap and pulled out a black pack of cigarettes. "And these are actually really good cloves. We should go smoke one after we're done eating, okay buddy?"  
  
Of the three of them, Duo had been to visit me the most over the last two years. It wasn't just for me that he came. It was because he couldn't talk to Heero or Trowa the way he needed to talk. They didn't talk much anyway, but when they did, if the topic was not mission related, it appeared a painful activity for them. Duo told me that he didn't want to hurt them, but that he needed to talk. So he came to me, even though I'd always been rude and short with him. I could see him covering for them now, taking the pressure off of them so that they wouldn't have to need to talk, filling the space with his voice and easy conversation.  
  
"Cigarette smoke smells awful and causes lung cancer."  
  
"Yeah, so do gundams," he retorted.  
  
"What?" Heero and I responded together. Trowa leaned forward on the table and rested his chin in his palm.  
  
Duo rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on; they stunk like fuel and burnt metal from all the mobile suit parts that splattered on them like bugs, and we were fucking inside them for days on end, throwing ourselves at other multi--ton metal death machines as capable of killing us as our own gundams if just one vital system malfunctioned or failed. Hell of a lot more effective than cancer from cigarettes if you ask me." That shut us up pretty effectively. "So are you comin' out with me to have a smoke or not?"  
  
I carefully stacked the glossy magazines and the packs of cigarettes into neat piles and nodded. "Of course."  
  
But not before I ate three of the nine cupcakes, packaged in a noisy plastic carton that crackled obnoxiously loud every time I reached for another. They were light and moist and the icing was thick and sweet and I hadn't realized how much of a sweet tooth I had developed here where the desert was, albeit healthier, applesauce.  
  
Trowa arched the one elegant eyebrow I could see as I finished. "Letting yourself go, Chang? Heero's going to have to spend extra time training with you on his next visit."  
  
I swallowed the last mouthful of cupcake and licked my spork clean. I had just inhaled three of them, but was civilized enough to use a utensil. Across from me, Heero looked downright eager. Next to me, Duo kept his mouth hidden by his cup of lukewarm cranberry juice, but his eyes were lit up with good humor.  
  
"Don't go to seed quite yet, or we'll have to put you behind a desk when we finally get you in uniform -- if we can even close the buttons, that is."  
  
Duo choked on his drink and Heero's fingers twitched on the table. I put down my plastic utensil very carefully and laid my hands on either side of my plate. "It's raining outside and the laundry crew hates it when I get clay on my uniform, but we can clear up any questions about by readiness for duty right now, Barton."  
  
He didn't even blink. "Not so soon after you've eaten so much. Wouldn't want you to cramp up."  
  
Heero and Duo's eyes were bouncing back and forth between us like they were watching us play ping--pong at the table in the corner. "Perhaps it's actually that you don't want to disturb that mysterious coif of yours. I've always wondered how that bit in the front stays perfectly still even when you're upside down in zero gravity hurtling through space. What's your secret? Is rain your undoing?"  
  
If possible, his eyebrow shot up even higher. "Perhaps. I might just melt. Is fattening food yours?"  
  
My lip curled and I felt a familiar combative, nasty spirit rising up my throat. I kept my temper on a pretty short leash here for safety reasons, though that didn't mean I didn't let it off when someone deliberately bated me. However, instead of returning with another insult, I told the truth -- I must have needed to say it more than I knew. "No, I think it is rather that my diet consists primarily of oatmeal and canned green beans that I--"  
  
Duo shot out of his chair. "And suddenly I could really go for that smoke? You comin', Chang?"  
  
Trowa's face had gone completely blank and Heero's hands clutched the edge of the table in a white--knuckled grip. I thought about warning him that these were the only tables we had and to be careful. We couldn't play poker on a surface that wasn't flat.  
  
I regretted my words almost immediately. I hadn't meant to worry them; that was the last thing I wanted. The whole truth was that I had become slightly anemic over the past two years because I tended to avoid the meat they provided, but it wasn't severe and it in no way compared with some of the other less pleasant conditions my body had suffered through during the war. Trowa had been communicating the only way he could; his tongue had only become sharper since Quatre's death.  
  
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'll be back in a few minutes." Heero nodded and Trowa offered a small cold smile that was probably an apology. As we walked out, Duo put a companionable arm around my shoulders which I promptly shrugged off. Without losing a beat, he showed me the pack of cloves, pealing off the plastic wrap as we headed for the yard. "Man, you are gonna love these, way better than regular cigs. They're a real treat."  
  
"Duo, I don't smoke. And neither do you."  
  
"I do sometimes," he said with a shrug, sounding a little defensive, as though smoking were something to be proud of. "And anyway, everyone should have a pack of these around for an occasion such as this. One pack won't kill you."  
  
We stepped out into the yard to find that it had turned into a reddish--brown lake. We stood in the shelter of the overhang and I stared out into the rain as he pulled two cloves from the pack. Taking a cheap orange lighter from his pocket, he lit both and passed one to me. I took a drag but didn't really inhale. The clove crackled and left a sweet taste in my mouth. I watched Duo lick his lips and smile to himself. I felt very young, younger than eighteen, younger than the youngest person in this place. Since I was the youngest person at Rehab for Terrorists, I decided I felt younger than myself -- the Wufei who had first walked into his cell with a stack of clothes and blankets and a shaved head. He had been a proud and spiteful sixteen--year--old terrorist. Now, I just felt like a delinquent and slightly unhinged kid, smoking but not inhaling a clove cigarette with my best friend beside me, tasting vanilla on his lips and smiling. I looked at the hand that held my cigarette and saw a bony wrist and skin that had grown darker under two Italian summers.  
  
"I think you frightened him," Duo finally said, not looking at me. I knew who he was talking about.  
  
"Trowa doesn't get scared."  
  
Duo snorted. "Sure he does. As soon as one of us is in trouble, Trowa's on it like stink on--" He caught me glaring at him and he coughed. "Like white on rice. He never gave up on you, even when he realized that you really were fighting for Mariemaia's army, and not--"  
  
"I wasn't fighting for her," I said for what had to have been the thousandth time. Trowa wasn't the only one who enjoyed, or at least felt the need to bait me. Nor was he the only one from which I would take it. "And if he never gave up on me, why didn't he end up here with me?"  
  
Duo's brow wrinkled in distress. This was a two--year--old argument that had never really been settled and probably wouldn't be until Trowa decided to talk about it. Didn't mean Duo wouldn't pick at it like an itchy scab. "As soon as he realizes there's not a damn thing he can do to help, he freezes up," he continued, choosing for the moment to step over the old land mine between all four of us. "You scared him because he's gotta leave you here and now he thinks they don't feed you enough and for the moment, all he can do is watch you scarf down cupcakes." He blew a cloud of smoke upward and then turned to look at me.  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
I shrugged. "He shouldn't worry about it, and I shouldn't have said anything. It's not as bad as that." Duo looked me up and down, and I glared back at him.  
  
"Oh yeah?"  
  
"Yes," I said a bit belligerently. "If I'd known all of you were coming here to give me shit about something as stupid as my diet, I would rather have sat in my cell and done homework." Duo was grinning at me again. "What," I snapped.  
  
"I forgot you still have homework. This really is a prison. Jeez, if I still had to... to turn in assignments -- my god, I think I'd--"  
  
"Right, that's it." I tossed the cigarette out into the rain and dove for Duo's middle just as he realized what I was doing and dropped the pack of cloves onto dry cement. I hit him hard in the gut with my shoulder and he landed with a loud grunt in a puddle, me right on top of him. He was laughing even as rain and mud soaked through our clothes. He wedged his left leg between mine and rolled us over, pushing the side of my face down in the mud, while his other hand groped up the outside of my t--shirt. He found essentially every ticklish spot I had and exploited it ruthlessly. Between fighting him off and generally flailing about, I thought that Meiren was probably the last person to tickle me -- back before we were married, when she was an annoying tomboy who didn't care to follow the rules of etiquette between betrothed children.  
  
I noticed while trying not to get a mouthful of mud that Duo was running his fingers over the red band of fabric that held my hair out of my face. From the corner of my eye I caught his careful scrutiny, and then his eyes met mine and he suddenly had his other hand up my shirt, sliding along my ribs and I could see that he was daring me to do something, to yell at him or to hit him. But I didn't fight him off. When I felt the underside of his forearm run up my back, I shivered and everything snapped into such sharp focus that I wasn't ticklish and I wasn't just out somewhere with my friend goofing off in the rain -- I wasn't sure of anything, except that it had been more than half my life since anyone had hands on my skin that weren't fists or doctors' hands. Then, the only thing I could do in that moment was fight back.  
  
Grabbing his wrist, I pinched a nerve until he yelped and let go of my ribs. But I didn't let go. He tried to pull away, but it was a half--hearted attempt, and before he could really tell that I was serious, I surged up out of the mud and twisted his arm into a hold. From the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of blond and looked up with sudden, irrational hope that I would see the last one of us -- his flight must have been delayed, or he got lost trying to find the place. It was in the middle of nowhere, after all. But it was Karl, leaning in the doorway, smoking one of my cloves and watching me with great interest.  
  
"Chang, you're hurting me," Duo growled. "You better let go before I get serious."  
  
Without taking my eyes away from Karl or the three guards who bullied him aside to get to us, I let go of Duo's wrist and sank back into the mud with a resigned groan. As they grabbed hold of my arms and clothes to get me back inside, I remembered that I was supposed to ask him something important, something I would surely never get to ask now. My birthday was officially over. I'd be lucky if I was allowed visitors for the next couple months. I looked at Karl and realized I'd blown it for the both of us and our stupid investigation.  
  
But I should have given Duo more credit, and I should never have underestimated the knee--jerk reaction he always had to force backed up with the power to punish, especially when exerted against one of his few friends. He sprang after me, spitting curses, and then he had an arm anchored around my middle, tugging me back toward him.  
  
"It was my fault, assholes, not his! I provoked the fight, and we weren't even fighting! Haven't you ever seen two guys goofing around before?"  
  
"Please let go, Mr. Maxwell," one of them said quietly.  
  
"I'm not going anywhere until you let go of him and promise you won't punish him for a fight I started." He tightened his grip and I realized this was my chance. I went limp, not struggling against either of them, falling forward against his shoulder. He tensed and tightened his arm around my ribs. "Chang?"  
  
"I have to ask you something important," I murmured, just loud enough that he could hear me over the rain. "I need your help. Please come back." I felt him nod and let go, as the guards succeeded in getting us all out of the rain. They let go, except for the one who kept hold of my arm, just above the elbow. More than most things here, I hated being led around like a delinquent kid. I hated being touched there -- I'd rather have been shoved around in cuffs. I jerked my arm out of the guards grip with a quick shrug, continuing ahead of him on my own. I could almost see him shaking his head at me, could see Duo faltering behind us, knowing something bad was about to happen. My skin tingled with the anticipation of rough hands.  
  
The guard -- his name was Busey -- was one of the more restrained employees at RCNP. He didn't usually touch us unless he really had to, and now he was required to. "Wufei, why do you make things more difficult for yourself?" he rumbled under his breath, even as I turned to the wall and placed my palms flat against it. He loomed behind me, kicking my legs apart and removing the cuffs from his belt. I didn't even know what Duo was shouting about at that point. I looked over my shoulder at him when Busey pulled my arms behind my back and latched the cuffs. Our eyes met and I could tell that he knew everything he said was only making it worse, that yelling wasn't helping either of us. But he couldn't stop, probably for the same reasons I never stopped -- for years we'd never had the luxury of letting our guard down, of slowing up or doing anything other than crashing full--speed toward our future. There could be no restraint when you were fighting only for yourself, when even your allies were ambiguous and shifting and fleeting. You never stopped.  
  
"I have to report this to Prescott immediately," Busey told me, keeping his voice low. "Mr. Maxwell is a Preventer. By assaulting him, you could lose all visitor privileges. Your sentence might be extended to--"  
  
I swallowed hard.  
  
"What is wrong with you people? I'm not a Preventer -- I don't have a badge. Do you need me to make a statement? I'll come with you -- I'll do whatever you--"  
  
"Duo," I called over my shoulder. "It's fine."  
  
He laughed harshly. "Not if they extend your sentence for another few months or a year, all for goofing off with your friend. Fuck, I--"  
  
"Who's extending Chang's sentence?" The sharp voice held no outward emotion, but for those of us who knew him, Trowa was angry. I turned to see him standing with Heero, both holding their badges in white--knuckled grips. For a moment, the absurdity of two eighteen--year--olds with Preventer's badges almost made me laugh. They'd grown considerably taller in two years, and during the wars, they'd wielded incredible power, but at no point had they given orders and expected them to be followed. They certainly didn't look comfortable with it now. Not that anyone other Duo and me would be able to tell that from their aggressive posture and stern expressions.  
  
Duo gave them the story, gesturing angrily at the guards who had followed us in and at Busey who still had his hand on my shoulder. All of the guards looked a little spooked with two badge--wielding Preventers staring them down.  
  
I suddenly felt like I would cause an even bigger scene if they stayed here even a second longer. In the two years I'd been here, I'd never been so humiliated as when I stood there watching them frantically think of ways to help me, knowing that they could not. Preventers had no power here. They couldn't pull rank for my sake. Heero watched me and I knew he knew it. My face was flushed hot and I had to look away from his helplessness and self--directed anger. Trowa stayed blank, and I could barely meet Duo's worried and furious gaze. I'd take extra laundry and bathroom duty over this any day. Room searches or an extended session with Rorty during which he made me face every life that I ended or ruined during the wars. Anything to be away from this.  
  
"It's fine," I bit out. "Please leave now."  
  
"But, Wu--"  
  
"Get out."  
  
"Chang..." That was Trowa.  
  
"Leave!"  
  
I left them there instead, not waiting around for them to decide what to do. I wanted the silence of my cell in mid day. I wanted Onur to come back filled with scorn and disappointment for how stupid I had been. I wanted Karl on the other side of my wall, lying awake all night. I wanted to be just like them -- inmates with no one to help them or care about them on the outside. They were cut out from the world; they had nothing but the lives they were building here. The ties that still bound me to the outside world were painful.  
  
Busey walked me into my cell and unlocked the cuffs. He rubbed a hand through thinning sand--colored hair. "You have to stay here until you hear from us, but I guess you already know that drill. Mr. Maxwell will doubtless leave a statement, and I'll tell them what I saw. It'll probably be okay."  
  
I nodded but said nothing and he left. Once alone and locked inside, I stripped out of my soaked and muddy coveralls, putting on the plain cotton pants we wore to sleep. Then I pulled Duo's bandanna from my hair as well as the tie and attacked it with my comb, working as much dirt and debris as I could without dunking my head in the sink.  
  
The silence of the cell block was comforting in its totality. Everyone was either in class, working in the kitchen or laundry, or spending their off time in the common room. Our days here were strictly regimented, but they were not grueling. We all worked to feed and clean up after each other, alongside the staff that was paid to do so. We all took classes in a field deemed suitable for us. Some of the classes were training programs for those more technically oriented; they'd come out of here well--educated electricians and mechanics. The science courses were limited to the ones that didn't encourage skills no longer needed in this time of peace. Biology and chemistry were relatively safe, but physics and engineering were not -- not because humanity no longer needed scientific innovation in these areas, but because the minds doing the innovating could not be trusted to keep with what kinds of innovation were appropriate.  
  
There were, of course, no future law enforcement officers here. But Une had worked out a special deal with Prescott allowing Heero to visit and train with me, so that I might be able to join Preventers at some point in the future. We trained in the basement on an old wrestling mat that smelled like feet, in an airless room that had us both light--headed by the end. I took literature classes officially. History, sociology, psychology and economics were also offered in the humanities and social sciences. There were no politics classes. And of course business classes were acceptable and encouraged. No matter how afraid of us the rest of the world was, there would always be a need for people who were good at making money.  
  
When we were not in class or seeing to our chores, we could go outside to the yard or stay inside in the common room. We were not permitted to laze about in our cells unless we'd broken a rule and had to be put somewhere until punishment was decided. I used those times for meditation. That period of absolute silence was almost always worth the punishment.  
  
I hoped that, if Duo was going to make a statement, he'd done it and left with Heero and Trowa. There were no visitors allowed in the cell block, but no lock had ever stopped Duo Maxwell once he set his mind to opening it. I hoped that if he was going to sneak in to see me, he would have already done so.  
  
Therefore, with a reasonable amount of confidence that I wouldn't be disturbed, I sank to the floor between my bunk and the wall and tried to sort all that had happened into some kind of order.  
  
+  
  
When Onur came back to the cell, it was after dinner, when all the inmates were returning for study time before lights out. He brought me a roll and some butter, and my stomach rumbled the moment he handed it to me. I thanked him but he didn't say anything and went right to his bunk to read over his trig notes. I'd known from the moment the cell door had closed behind me that he would be disappointed when he found out about the fight. Judging by his posture, I'd guessed correctly. I'd disappointed him like one of the students he hoped to have, when he left RCNP as a certified math teacher -- I'd been given just a little too much freedom and had stepped all over the rules. What had happened today reflected poorly on me, but I knew he would take it personally, like he'd failed me somehow, like he could have prevented it if he'd only made me do my homework. Or something.  
  
But neither of us said anything, and I stayed where I was in the corner. I ate the roll and all the butter in the little plastic packet. It wasn't a mystery why things had gotten out of hand today. The perpetual build--up of frustration, and the inevitable explosion of temper that could make Duo duck for cover, cause Trowa to exercise more than just his left eyebrow muscle, put Heero on an adrenalin rush that lasted for a good hour, and encourage Quatre to begin anew his quest to find a shrink who wasn't afraid of me occurred with stunning regularity here. Onur and Karl for some reason were never phased.  
  
But my temper today wasn't the mystery. The part that had me really bothered was the bit where I could still perfectly recall how it had felt to have Duo's hand on my ribs. That feeling was not recognizable -- or at least it wasn't familiar. I'd been here long enough to know how sex worked for the men. Sometimes I heard them at night, but it was rare for roommates to be in any sort of relationship. More often they were relieving tension alone in their bunks. Other times I saw it in the showers, with both willing and less enthusiastic participants. With the survival instincts nature gave to a goldfish, a person knew to stay well clear of all such established relationships between inmates. Some appeared normal; some were decidedly less healthy. I wanted nothing to do with either variety -- had in fact gone to considerable lengths to make that fact known -- and I hadn't wanted any such attachments at any other point in my life so far.  
  
During the wars, I'd never even considered it. Duo thought this strange -- or so he'd said when we were looking for apartments and he'd blurted the question. He'd then proceeded to tell me of his exploits when he'd been dirt--side, hiding out at different high schools by day, blowing up military bases by night. He'd said that he liked to take girls out for coffee just to prove that he could do something normal and enjoy himself. They usually came onto him because "Admit it, Wu, no girl could resist this face," and, presto!, instant stress relief in the form of sloppy groping and even sloppier kisses.  
  
It wouldn't work that way for me, I was sure of it. Unlike Duo, I hadn't felt the need to work out the considerable stress that built up with each mission with sex. If I had, the only individuals I could have had such an arrangement with were the other four pilots. No one was anonymous; no one was safe. They were the only ones I could have trusted, and since I didn't trust them during the wars, even they were excluded. They hadn't expressed any interest in me anyway, and if they had, my response would probably have been one of violence... as it had been with Duo today.  
  
But today had been different. Today, him touching me had felt good. Clinically, objectively, it was easy to see that I had liked it. I didn't know why now, after nearly eighteen years, it would feel good. This was neither the time nor the place for such feelings.  
  
I heard Karl moving at my back, pacing around his cell. It was comforting to hear him and I wasn't surprised to feel a few taps on the wall directly behind my spine when his footsteps abruptly stopped. It was a variation of old Morse code -- made him feel like we were getting away with something, and gave his incessant pen--tapping a sense of direction.  
  
'You there?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
'You okay?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
'Go to the door.'  
  
Onur didn't look up from his books as I got to my feet and shuffled the few paces to the door, flip flops loud in the silence of our cell. I pressed my face against the metal bars and looked as far to the right as I could. I couldn't see more than a few pieces of dirty blond hair poking through the bars.  
  
"Bummer of a birthday, Chang," he said and I could tell he was smirking. I shrugged, though obviously he couldn't see it.  
  
"Wasn't so bad," I countered. And really, until Heero and Trowa tried to pull rank for me, everything, including the tussle in the mud and the ensuing fight with the guards had been at least interesting. "Sorry I didn't get to introduce you to Duo."  
  
"I'm not sure I'd like him."  
  
"I bet he'd love you."  
  
"Excellent taste in clove cigarettes."  
  
I looked down. I'd forgotten all about my birthday presents, as well as the pack of cloves he'd left outside. "I didn't get to pick them up, and I don't think he did either, in all the excitement."  
  
"You think I'd let them go to waste? You obviously don't know me very well." His hair disappeared and then I saw long fingers and a hand sticking through the bars along the floor. I got down on hands and knees, sticking my own hand through the bars to reach the pack he slid toward me.  
  
"Did you get a chance to talk to him?" he asked softly. I grabbed the pack and kept my voice low as a guard approached on rounds. "Not really. There wasn't time. But he said he'd come back, and he will. He has to." The thirteenth of July was approaching.  
  
"Good." Then, as the guard passed, "Make sure you let me have a few of those," he said. "You'll never smoke them all, and they'll just get stale."  
  
"Please step back from the bars, Wufei," Brandt requested with his usual excessive politeness. "Unless you'd like me to extend your latest penalty." I didn't need to look at him to hear the sneer in his voice, and kept my eyes lowered, backing off and muttering something that he would hopefully take as an apology.  
  
When he was out of earshot, I returned to the bars to see that Karl was back as well. "...About that," he started.  
  
"It's not a problem," I cut in. "I'll deal with whatever penalty they decide is appropriate."  
  
"Doesn't look like it'll be bad. Your buddy, Maxwell, made a statement." I groaned. "He explained the circumstances, said you weren't even really fighting and that he'd been the one to start it. They must've believed him because I think they're only gonna suspend your visiting hours for a few weeks, six at the most."  
  
I turned to lean my back against the bars. "Fantastic."  
  
I looked up when Onur abruptly slammed his trig textbook shut. He swung his legs over the side of his bunk and leaned forward. "What the hell is your problem? Your friend kept you out of a lot more trouble than you might have been in -- trouble you deserve to be in."  
  
I glared right back at him. "It's bad enough that they come here so often, so everyone knows that I--"  
  
"What," he snapped, "have friends? Have connections to the outside? Yes, everyone here knows you have friends. They know that you have people who care about you."  
  
I kept my voice low, but gestured to include the entire cell block. "And you don't see how dangerous that is? You think they don't see two Preventers coming in here with another pissed--off ex--terrorist and don't notice that the three of them are all I have on--planet and off? You think they don't see how wide open that leaves me?"  
  
Onur snorted and rolled his eyes. "They watch through that tiny window in the door to see the dark--haired one -- what's his name?"  
  
"Yuy," I supplied.  
  
"They watch the two of you clobber the hell out of each other; they see that you can beat him almost half the time. They see the paces you put yourself through in the yard during morning exercises. Your reputation comes from that, and from your foul temper, from those stupid fights you get into with nearly every faction and splinter group here. Your friends are not making it more dangerous for you by trying to help you. The only thing you need to worry about is Prescott finally giving up on your scrawny, contrary butt and sending you someplace where your friends can't visit you as often as they like, and you can't take classes, and you don't get time for those abusive morning exercises. Your friends make you tolerable to the rest of us. They do us all a favor. And your friend Maxwell did right by you today, so give it a rest."  
  
I scowled at the floor. Karl stayed silent next door, though he hadn't moved from where he sat. "They make it harder by interfering."  
  
"They make you tolerable," he said again. Having delivered what he felt to be the most urgent portion of his lecture, Onur shifted back onto his bed again, flipping through his textbook to find where he'd left off. "And look on the bright side," he offered. "Now you'll have extra time to study and catch up on the coursework you've been ignoring. You'll participate more in class if you're better prepared." I rolled my eyes and he frowned. "I mean it."  
  
"I know you do, Onur." It was a funny thing -- hearing his name pronounced correctly. Whenever I said it, whatever he said to me came out a little less harsh. I liked to say his name correctly because no one else ever did. Everyone pronounced it phonetically; but when I'd first come here, he told me the right way: "Oh--NOOR" with the "r" ending in a soft half--whistle. "We've already talked about this."  
  
The frown line between his eyebrows lifted. "I know, and I am trying to help you. You have to show that you are ready to reintegrate as an ordinary citizen. You have to prove to a whole committee that you are no longer a threat. And you can't do that if you're--"  
  
"I was reintegrating just fine before three armed Preventers came into my home while I was washing my dishes and served a warrant for my arrest."  
  
Arguably, not a true statement, except for the dishes part. Duo would make such an argument, but thankfully, he wasn't here. And thankfully, that sullen comment shut up my roommate and encouraged my neighbor to get up off the floor and head for his bunk, probably to contemplate the unfortunate moment when he found out that his efforts at reintegration had been deemed unsatisfactory and unsafe. Onur looked to be remembering the same thing.  
  
I took the opportunity and climbed up to my bunk, making a successful escape. I pulled the blanket over my head and settled one hand along my ribs, mimicking what Duo had done when we were both on the ground in the rain. I wasn't surprised when I felt nothing.


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

new sheen all over everything  
when you open up your mouth to sing.  
baseballs travel further when you watch them fly.  
apples fatten on the trees when you walk by.  
you bring something unreplaceble to each and every day.  
or you used to anyway.  
but this world couldn't hold you  
and you slipped free  
this world couldn't hold you  
and you slipped free  
without me  
_\- "Bluejays and Cardinals" m.g._  
  
The weight pressing down on him was familiar but he couldn't put a name to the body. It felt like someone he knew. It felt like someone he trusted. And it felt like they knew what they were doing. Simple, steady, rhythmic, in control, confident, it filled him with a warm, dark sense of security. This was exactly right, exactly what he was supposed to feel. His head pressed back into the pillow and the feeling in his gut twined and curled into one sharp, perfect moment of completeness. The figure above him was real and heavy, the sweat on his skin slick under his palm. Wufei slid his hand along the young man's ribs, rubbing his forearm up his back, fingers just tracing the knobs of his spine. He'd known this person forever. His hand moved up from vertebra to vertebra, until he reached the base of the skull, finding damp skin under thick hair.  
  
He tried to open his eyes and found them heavy and sandy with weariness. The weight shifted off him and laid down beside him. He rolled into the warmth now settled next to him and came up against something cool and unmoving. Hands groping under the blanket for the familiar presence of the young man, he found a pair of bony knees dressed in crisp trousers, curled against a narrow chest underneath an equally crisp dress shirt. He fought with his eyelids and his voice, needing to find what he had lost, needing it desperately. He clutched at this other body until he found a neck and a jaw, cheekbones and hair under his fingers like fine silk. Wrenching his eyes open, he found Quatre in bed with him, dead as the day they'd found him.  
  
I blinked and stared and didn't breath until the body faded and I realized that it was the cold wall against my palm, not cold skin. Then I took a breath. The dream and the nightmare were making my chemistry go haywire. My shirt clung to my chest, and I shivered as sweat dried; my heart thudded in my ears and my fingers buzzed with adrenalin. But I felt a deep physical longing for the comfort the dream had given me. I wanted it back because it had been real; it had been mine. But Quatre had been real too. I could feel them both - terror and longing all at once. Then I rolled away from the wall and noticed the sticky, rapidly cooling mess in my underwear. Fantastic.  
  
I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, searching for my flip flops with my toes before I stepped down onto the floor. Then I shuffled to the sink to clean up. I heard Onur shift in his bunk and scowled down at my stomach, holding open the elastic band and wiping away the evidence of my dream. When I was finished, I turned and even in the dark, I saw him watching me.  
  
"They're coming tomorrow, right? It's the 13th."  
  
I nodded. "I'm not ready to do this again."  
  
+  
  
Trowa and Heero showed up first. They came together, and I was waiting for them in the common room, seated at the table where we'd celebrated my birthday almost two months earlier. We nodded our greetings and they pulled out two chairs across from me. They hung their coats on the backs of the chairs, and I noticed that they weren't Preventer jackets. They both looked like they could use a drink and I felt bad that they couldn't smuggle in a flask. I felt like I could use one, too. I wasn't ready for this. I'd tried all morning to be ready, not actually knowing what being ready really meant. Did it mean not getting emotional? Did it mean embracing my emotions and crying like a little kid? Did it mean holding hands or solemn, respectful silence? They were all coming here, which meant I was sort of the host, which meant I had to look out for them, which meant I had to be ready for them, which meant I was back to where I started not knowing what "ready" meant.  
  
It was difficult for me to believe it had already been a year since they'd visited like this, for this reason. Heero didn't really look like he believed it either. He didn't look up at me, and I got the distinct impression that Trowa had dragged him here. Trowa, as usual looked cold and blank.  
  
"You look like hell," he said. It wasn't an insult, so I didn't treat it as one.  
  
"Should I look different?"  
  
He shrugged and shook his head, absolving himself of having to make that call. Then he removed a small package from his pocket and offered a quirked eyebrow as he put it on the table. I smelled it immediately - marinated chicken of some kind and broccoli. "You could use the protein," he murmured.  
  
"Yes, I could," I replied, mouth already watering. He hadn't brought any utensils and I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that someone brought me food by going to get some, so I ate all it with my fingers. It was still warm and the chicken was tender and clean-tasting. The broccoli was crisp and salty and it was probably the best thing I'd tasted in two years. He put two peaches on the table after I was done with the chicken and I made the conscious decision not to feel humiliated over devouring food that someone had brought to me out of concern and perhaps pity. If I thought that Trowa would hold it over my head later, I would have taken the food and given it to Onur or Karl, but watching him watch me eat, it wasn't difficult for me to see that I'd just made his day - as well as this day, of all days, could be made.  
  
"The last time we were here did not end the way we would have liked it," Trowa said softly, his lips barely moving. "It was not my intention to provoke you into acting out. I hadn't meant to cause trouble."  
  
I laughed. "Oh, it ended just the way I like it." Trowa's mouth tightened and Heero tensed. I sucked peach juice off my fingers and told the truth. "You didn't cause trouble. They would say I went looking for it." Heero abruptly stood up and walked towards the rear corner of the common room. Trowa and I watched him go, not sure whether something was wrong or if he'd just decided to wash his hands. We both relaxed when he returned with a damp paper towel and handed it to me. I finished wiping off my hands, watching Trowa watch me do it.  
  
"Is that how you see what happened?"  
  
At that moment, Duo appeared in the doorway, eyes darting over the small crowd to find our table. We made eye contact and he started toward us, dropping his gaze as he came. "I think that... they were looking to find me in trouble."  
  
"They do that for everyone here?" he asked, moving the empty food carton back and forth across the table with his knuckles.  
  
"More or less. They keep a close eye. Obviously."  
  
Duo made it to the table then and came around to my side before touching either Heero or Trowa. It was always better to approach them from the front with both hands visible. He dropped his outer shirt over the back of the chair and tugged his t-shirt out of the waist of his jeans before circling back around to greet them. Heero stood up and gave him an awkward hug that lasted a little longer than he appeared to want, but Duo didn't let go until Heero finally gave up and wrapped both arms the whole way around his ribcage. They were pretty much the same size and height and when Heero hooked his chin over Duo's shoulder and closed his eyes, I thought that they looked like brothers who hadn't seen each other in long enough that this greeting could be different than their others.  
  
He bullied a similar hug out of Trowa, though it didn't last as long and didn't look like it needed to. When he came back to my side of the table he tugged on his t-shirt, tenting it open to try and get some air underneath. From my seat I saw a shadowy strip of pale skin and a trail of dark hair disappearing into his jeans. I looked away and then jumped a little when he laid his hand on the back of my neck. "Hey, buddy," he murmured, taking a seat beside me. His hand was sweaty, and he left it there until I turned and met his gaze. His eyes had dark smudges underneath them, making the irises look bruised purple. I leaned away from him and he shifted further into his own chair, shoving his hands into his pockets. I pulled the deck of cards from my pocket of my coveralls and laid them down in the middle of the table.  
  
Last year, we didn't talk about Quatre. They all just showed up, and they never said whether it was planned or whether they each decided on their own that they needed to see the pilot they nearly lost on the one-year anniversary of the death of the one they did. Duo showed up first and we played basketball until Trowa came and two-on-one didn't seem fair. But we kept the court until Heero wandered into the yard, looking skittish and depressed all at once. We played two-on-two for a few minutes until Duo claimed he'd pass out with the heat, and then we went inside and continued to not talk about him while we played Gin Rummy until visiting hours ended.  
  
By the looks of it, Duo didn't want the afternoon to go that way this time. He took a quick breath and held it, and we all tensed, waiting for him to say something. Then he let it out with a soft huff and leaned forward to put his elbows on the table. He picked up the deck of cards and started shuffling it, all the while glancing among the three of us as he started to speak. "So, here's what we're gonna do. We'll play Gin for as long as we feel like it, but the game is not an excuse to not talk to each other. We all showed up to bug Chang for the same reason, and if we don't wanna talk about the reason, I guess that's okay, but we are gonna talk to each other. Got it?"  
  
Unsurprisingly, Heero wasn't looking at any of us, Trowa looked mildly irritated, and I was the spokesman for the group. "What is it you'd like to talk about, Maxwell?"  
  
He shot me a glare for my tone of voice and then dealt Trowa and Heero their first cards. "It's been twelve months; why not start with some of the things we did this year that we haven't already told each other?" He glanced up at Trowa and Heero as he continued to deal. "And no Preventer crap. I know it's your job and sometimes mine, but I don't wanna hear about it. All the interesting stuff is classified anyway. Gossip about Sally or Zechs I can handle, but nothing more legit than what you'd find on the bathroom wall." Heero snorted a laugh and then looked like he'd spooked himself. Duo laughed right back at him and we all picked up our cards.  
  
When no one said anything else, Duo shook his head and mumbled, "For fuck sake, okay, I'll go first." He drew, considered his hand, and then discarded. "I found Howard a lady-friend. She owns a small engine repair shop on L2, and when she became a client of ours a few months ago, I hooked the two of them up."  
  
Trowa arched an eyebrow and looked impressed. He drew from the pile, laid down three sevens and then discarded. "Well done. Does he find time to spend with her, given all the traveling you do?"  
  
Duo nodded. "He's decided that colony cluster is the place to be for salvage missions. And he's right. The place has always been a dump, but they shoot shit out into space all the time these days, now that they're tryin' to clean it up a bit. We can barely keep ahead of it all." Silence fell as both Heero and I took our turns, then Duo spoke up again. "Okay, dealer went first; now you go, Barton. Don't think I'm gonna make this easy on any of you. Whether or not the point of today is to distract ourselves or to wallow, I want dialog."  
  
"Alright. Catherine's giving up the circus and moving to Rome to live closer to us." He looked to me for a reaction and I tried to look suitably interested. Heero didn't so much as blink, which said to me that he already knew. "There was an accident and she broke her ankle, but I think it will be good for her to stay in one place for awhile." Duo had perked up immediately at Trowa's conspicuous, though perhaps unintended pronoun use. He made all the appropriate noises and expressed his sympathy, though he was clearly more interested in that 'us.' Living up to my reputation as a selfish misogynist who wouldn't give two shits that someone, who may have served me horrible coffee in the past, fell off her tight-rope, I didn't say anything.  
  
Heero cleared his throat when it was his turn to speak, paused to lay down a red ten, jack, queen run, and then said in his usual nasal monotone, "Relena is-"  
  
"Don't care," Duo interrupted. "Whatever you're about to say, we probably already know about it; she's running the world and has no privacy."  
  
He gave a dissatisfied "Hn" and wrinkled his brow in thought. "Noin told me Zechs lets her braid his hair in pigtails before they go to bed."  
  
If Duo'd had a beverage, it would have gone shooting out his nose. Instead he gasped and snorted a few times and then dissolved into helpless laughter, pounding the table a few time for extra emphasis. Trowa was laughing quietly, hand in front of his mouth. "Why on earth would she tell you that, Yuy?" I asked, trying and failing to conceal my amusement.  
  
The thoughtful look was back. "I don't really know. Maybe it's because she misses having Maxwell around the office." He turned to Duo. "You had that mission with her not too long ago. Did she...?"  
  
"Yes," he said, struggling to regain his breath. "Yes, she did."  
  
"Good grief," I muttered. "I bet they looked charming."  
  
"They did, and yours would, too. Now, spill, buddy."  
  
I played my king on Heero's run and gave it some thought. "We're getting a new dishwasher in the kitchen, which will make all of our lives much easier since the old one broke three months ago."  
  
Duo rolled his eyes. "Booooring. That has essentially nothing to do with you."  
  
I made a face back at him. "Yes. It does. No more dish-pan hands for me. Our cells don't exactly come stocked with hand lotion. And anyway, none of you said anything that actually had anything to do with your own lives either."  
  
Duo looked a little sheepish when he a drew a card and eyed his hand. "Okay, okay. Oh!" We all watched him expectantly. "I've got a good one. This is new; I don't know how I forgot until now to tell you. I bought Scythe a present in honor of our second year together. Got a sweet deal on it too; working with Howard sure has it's perks." He leaned in close and waited until we followed suit, then whispered, "I picked up a cloaking system liked I had on Deathscythe Hell. I already installed it and it works like new. No bugs or anything."  
  
A moment of stunned silence fell as he watched for our reactions. Finally Heero spoke up. "Duo, you know those are banned, both on Earth and the Colonies. Right?" Duo's cheeky grin and quick nod dared him to keep talking. "And you know we're Preventors. Right?" Beside him, Trowa's smirk widened.  
  
"He's daring us to do something about it, Yuy." Duo chuckled and laid down three aces. Trowa tapped his cards on the table and then picked up Duo's discard. "So, is this round titled 'In what illicit activities have you participated over the past year?' Shouldn't be too difficult for Chang, but Yuy and I are upholders of the law. Breaking the law is wrong, Maxwell." Duo kept laughing. "But since this is a circle of trust and brotherhood, I faked a sick day to take my partner to a monster truck rally back in March." The volume of Duo's laughter increased by a few decibels, turning several heads in the common room.  
  
I met Heero's gaze across the table. "I'm pretty sure you already knew that one, being his partner and all." His smile was small but real.  
  
"I didn't know he took a sick day."  
  
Trowa turned to him, looking a little defensive. "Like I could take a vacation day for that? Une would have wanted to know where I was going, and since you were still on leave, you didn't have to fake anything. You would have done the same."  
  
"You were on leave in March?" I asked. But before he could answer, Duo interrupted.  
  
"Oi, that's for the next round, when we compare war wounds. Heero's gotta stick to the theme."  
  
"Why are you in charge of deciding the theme?"  
  
"Because it was my idea. Now tell us when you were bad, Heero."  
  
He spent the next two turns trying to come up with something, and finally, flushing under his tan, he muttered, "I went right on red when there was a sign saying I couldn't."  
  
Duo and I both groaned, Duo gesturing with his free hand, "Heero, you're basically a cop. You get paid to not obey traffic laws."  
  
"I wasn't in uniform; I was in my own car. It counts," he muttered, scowling at me. "And now it's your turn."  
  
"Let's see," I started. "I'm in a rehabilitative facility because I broke the law, so breaking the rules here should earn me bonus points." Both Heero and Trowa heeded the warning in my tone and tensed. Duo watched me from the corner of his eye, a challenge in that sly look. "Just last week I watched a fight between a couple of Romefellar bullies and this skinny White Fang kid. I didn't report it, which is what I was supposed to have done. I watched him lose and said nothing. I kept my head down and my nose out of trouble."  
  
"That was very big of you," Trowa murmured.  
  
Duo's jaw clenched so tight I heard his teeth grind together as I threw his advice from a few weeks ago back in his face. "My turn," he said quickly. "Let's compare scars." He laid his cards face down on the table and jerked down the collar of his t-shirt. His collarbone stuck out amidst the wiry muscle of his shoulder and neck. "We had a big haul around last Christmas, and I was in the bay, looking through some of what we brought in. An unstable MS chest plate buckled in the temp change from no atmosphere to inside a salvage ship. The rivets shot out like bullets and one of them chipped my collarbone." I leaned forward to get a look, curious in spite of myself. I noticed, Heero and Trowa also looking on with interest. Freak accidents were like that. The wound had healed in a wide thick scar pointed diagonally towards his throat. A few degrees to the right and the rivet probably would have gone into his neck.  
  
"You were lucky," I said.  
  
Duo gave me an ugly grin. "Can you really call it luck anymore? How many times can you dodge death before you start wondering whether you're immune?"  
  
"Exactly the number it takes to realize that your friends are not," Trowa murmured. "You were lucky." He pulled aside the hair that hid his right eye to reveal a jagged scar cutting across his brow. "And so was I."  
  
Duo grimaced at the sight of it and rubbed his hand over the wound on his shoulder. "What was that?"  
  
"Stray bullet. Not unlike your situation, I guess."  
  
"When did it happen?" I asked.  
  
"The same time this happened," Heero said softly, rolling up his sleeve past his elbow and shoving his forearm across the table for Duo and me to see. "That wasn't a stray. They meant to hit me, though fortunately their aim was off." There was a clean entry point, but no exit wound. The bullet must have lodged itself in his humerus.  
  
"That would be why you were on leave in March, I'm guessing?" I asked, and he nodded. "And also why you didn't come to train with me until April." Another curt nod. He must have noticed that both Duo and I looked curious.  
  
"Drug runners in one of the suburbs tore up the whole neighborhood. They're all either dead now or incarcerated."  
  
"Oh, good," Duo said lightly.  
  
Then they all looked expectantly at me, cards forgotten in their hands. If this was what Duo had intended from the beginning, he was getting what he wanted from us all a lot faster than he probably thought he would. We'd be spinning a bottle before too long at the rate we were going.  
  
There were plenty of new scars to choose from; a few of them weren't even scars yet. Opting for the one that would disturb them all the least and leave me with the most dignity, I folded my leg up against my chest and pulled my pant-leg up over my knee to show what was left of the bruising from the fight after Duo gave me the bandanna. It didn't really hurt anymore, but the skin was still discolored. "The same bullies who regularly terrorize anyone weighing under 150 pounds, including the kid I mentioned earlier, decided they liked my hair band more than I did. One of them tried to break my kneecap; I broke his instead."  
  
I watched Trowa's eyes travel from my knee to the bandanna holding back my hair. "I'd been meaning to ask you where you got that, but our afternoon ended abruptly last time."  
  
"I found it."  
  
"I gave it to him," Duo said in the same breath. Heero's dark gaze flicked from Duo to me and back and then to Trowa. The corner of Trowa's mouth twitched, my face went hot, and Duo shifted in his seat, reaching around to rub the back of his neck. He picked up his cards, drew from the pile and forced a smile. "Gin."  
  
+  
  
"I've been to see a grief counselor a couple times," Duo said, as he rearranged his cards in his hand. "Just, you know, to see if they could tell me something that would make me feel less..." He looked up. "I don't know. Less something."  
  
We only had about half an hour left. Visiting hours would be over and they would all leave me to deal with the rest of this day by myself. Onur would take over after dark, so it wasn't so bad. But I had four hours on my own that were starting to look pretty daunting. We hadn't mentioned Quatre yet. We'd spent the afternoon telling each other silly, stupid things, sad things, pathetic and depressing things. The conversation got heavier and lighter on Duo's whim and our willingness to go along with it. As the minutes and hours ticked by, they hid less and less. After they left, when I was alone, or maybe in class tonight, I would catalog everything they said, every volunteered bit of information about their lives. I would count the number of times either Heero or Trowa said "we" and "us" when relating one of their stories. When Duo asked us about the best food we'd had all year, they'd been together when they'd eaten it. I'd caught another one of Duo's sly looks when they said it. If I went through everything again before I forgot any of it, I would be able to remember it all later, whenever I needed it.  
  
Duo was the first to approach Quatre obliquely, but he put it all out on the table when he looked up at Heero and Trowa and asked without really asking that they say something to back him up.  
  
"Has it helped?" Trowa asked.  
  
Duo shrugged. "I don't know; I don't think so. This guy, he doesn't know me, doesn't know what I've- everything I've done. I mean, he knows because I told him, but he doesn't know, really. I don't know how many people I've killed. I could find out, I guess - they keep pretty close track of those things, of casualties - but I don't think that would..." He trailed off, and spent the next few seconds deciding what to discard. "Talking to this guy doesn't help me remember Quatre, doesn't help me forget him either, just makes me think... about dead people, about Quatre as another body."  
  
"He doesn't sound like a very good grief counselor," I said, attempting to cover up the physical reaction I had remembering the nightmare. I could feel his cold skin under my hands, feel the fine quality of his clothing, how soft his hair was.  
  
Duo was shaking his head. "No, I don't think I'll go anymore." And that was it; that was Duo's turn. Now it was up to the rest of us, and Trowa didn't look too excited to be speaking next.  
  
"We-" Heero started, looking to Trowa. Trowa seemed startled, used to round after round of ordered confessions. It was his turn, not Heero's. But he nodded for his partner to continue. "We wanted to go to L4. We tried to go, to see what we could find."  
  
I looked to Duo and he was spooked, eyes a little wider than usual. "And?" he urged. "Did you go?"  
  
Heero hesitated and then shook his head. "We tried, but Une wouldn't authorize it. It was right after we joined and she didn't want us doing anything that would draw attention. No one trusted us, especially not Trowa."  
  
"The Winners didn't want us there either, looking around, treating his office like a crime scene."  
  
"We tried to contact Rashid and the Maguanacs, but they wouldn't talk to us."  
  
"It was only two months after his death. They were probably too..."  
  
"We tried all of his sisters, thinking that one of them had to want to know what had gone on with him, what he'd been going through that he would-"  
  
"But eventually, they stopped answering our messages. The last one we got asked us politely to fuck off and leave him with some dignity."  
  
"I tried to hack into their computers, thinking that maybe they'd have something there, a coroner's report, an autopsy... anything like that."  
  
"But Winner security is just as good as Preventers. They probably hired the same guy to do it."  
  
"I got nowhere."  
  
"We haven't tried looking again in about a year."  
  
Duo's and my eyes bounced between them until they'd finished the story of their frustrated efforts. Finally, Duo shook his head, bringing himself out of a daze. "A year ago... why didn't you tell us? We- or I, at least, could have helped you. I could have-"  
  
"You weren't here," Trowa said, and if I heard the underlying accusation there, Duo probably did, too. "You took off for L2 and the sweepers before either of us could-"  
  
"We didn't think you wanted to know," Heero murmured.  
  
"But I came back! I always came back to see you. I come back almost every fucking month!"  
  
"Then maybe you shouldn't have left at all," Trowa snapped. "You'd have saved a bundle on fuel and docking costs and you might have been able to help out your friends instead, of playing catch-up every few weeks."  
  
I sat back in my chair and forced my gaze away from my friends, hands in my lap, gripping my thighs until it hurt. As entertaining as this afternoon had been, as informative as it had been, it was nothing less than humiliating for me. We'd laughed and shared moments of heartfelt understanding silence. If Quatre had been here, he probably would have made us hold hands. But this afternoon had been in his honor, and in his memory which unfortunately disqualified him from attending. If he'd been here, he would have picked up on how much I dreaded my turn to speak. Whether from his space heart or something as simple and obvious as my posture, he would have known that every time I volunteered a story from the past year, I was setting out for display every facet of how I was different from them, and he would have put a stop to the game before it even started. Heero turned right on red; I watched a kid lose a couple teeth. They came under fire in the line of duty; I barely escaped with my bones in tact and could do nothing about it except be ready for it to happen again. Duo had the best burger of his life; I had the two peaches Trowa brought from a fruit stand not three miles down the road. They were in contact with Quatre's family, with his friends, pursuing the mystery of his death with every resource they had; I had a friend inside who looked like Quatre but behaved nothing like him and who might actually be crazy, rather than kind and gentle and generous and everything anyone could ever want in a dear friend. Duo, Heero and Trowa were not happy - it was easy to see that they weren't. But they weren't like me either,and I could not be a part of their lives the way they were a part of each other's. It wasn't a surprise, and it wasn't a revelation, but a cruel reminder.  
  
I was no longer a part of the conversation, which had now turned into a full-blown argument, so I got up and walked out, heading for the yard and some fresh air. There were now only a few minutes left of visiting hours. I had the infantile urge to hide from my friends until time was up and they'd have to leave without saying goodbye. I had almost headed for the cell block when greater reason and hopefully, some scrap of maturity won out and I continued outside. Dinner was in about an hour, followed by my evening lit class and then curfew, which was a fancy word for 'lock down,' at eight. I made it out to the yard and almost to a table when someone called my name. I glanced over my shoulder to see that it was a guard.  
  
"I've still got ten minutes, Busey. I just need some air before smelling like the mess hall for the rest of the night."  
  
He let it go, and left me to sit by the basketball courts. I watched a few Romefeller men shoot hoops and then rested my head on my outstretched arm. The late afternoon sun had the full force of a hot day behind it and even though my t-shirt had been clean that morning, now it smelled like sweat and felt dirty on my skin. The underside of the red bandanna was damp on my hair. I kept an eye on the yard entrance and one on the court, since the guys playing were not friends of mine. I watched Duo emerge from inside, followed a moment later by Trowa and Heero. They now had six minutes, and I really wished I had gone back to the cell block. Heero and Trowa stayed by the main building, leaning against the wall. Duo would be the one to try and smooth things over. He always had been. He jogged up to where I sat and stood in front of me, blocking my view of the basketball court.  
  
"Hey," he started, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. "I'm an asshole."  
  
I looked up at him without lifting my head from my arm. "Yeah."  
  
"Why didn't you tell me to shut up and just play cards like we did last year?"  
  
"Because three-quarters of the time, I was enjoying myself."  
  
He sat down across from me and rested one elbow on the table. With his other hand, he traced a line down the skin of my underarm. It tickled a little, but mostly felt odd and intimate - familiar, like he always did that when he apologized to me. I sat up straight and pulled my arm back and he withdrew his hand like nothing was out of the ordinary. "When can you come back?" I asked without thinking.  
  
"I can be back in a few days."  
  
"There's something really important I need to ask you, something I need your help with."  
  
"Okay. I'll be here."  
  
"Without turning your head, look at Heero and Trowa over there by the wall."  
  
I saw his eyes slide to the side. "You pick up on how often they said 'we' or 'us' today?"  
  
"I was going to try and figure out exactly how many times during class tonight."  
  
"Think they're sleeping together yet?"  
  
I shrugged. "Not sure."  
  
"Yeah, me neither."  
  
We watched them in silence after that. Heero had one shoulder against the wall, the other angled slightly forward. His head was lowered, one hand buried in his hair. He looked like he was about to be sick, which was more than a little alarming to me, but Trowa didn't seem too worried. He stood close to his partner, shoulders curled inward toward him, head lowered as well, almost touching Heero's.  
  
"Heero's got some problems that he doesn't talk about," Duo murmured, eyes forward again.  
  
"Seems that way. But he never talks about anything, so..."  
  
Duo stiffened as he saw one guard approach them and another head out towards us. "Hey, buddy, I gotta get over there before Heero does something that'll get him fired." I watched him stand up without getting up myself.  
  
"Tell them I said goodbye."  
  
He hesitated, looking back down at me. "I will."  
  
"I'll see you in a few days."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
I put my head back down on my arm and watched the basketball game.  
  
+  
  
I waited for Onur to return from his class, pacing in the middle of the room. I didn't want to look up at my bunk. Even knowing that there was nothing up there except a blanket, I still wasn't sure what my imagination might supply. Better to keep my eyes on the floor or the hall beyond. I saw Karl pass by on the way to his cell. He took one look at me and kept going.  
  
Onur finally arrived just before the doors slid shut. I turned to greet him and he grabbed my shoulder when I tripped over the shoes I'd left in the middle of the floor. I'd been avoiding them while pacing, but now caught my flip-flop on one thick-soled shoe and nearly lost my balance. I met his gaze and then closed my eyes. "It's been a really long day."  
  
He nodded and reached up onto his bunk to pull down his blanket. When I made no move to get mine, he reached around me and did it for me. He spread them both out on the floor, one on top of the other. Then he went down on his knees, pulling me down beside him. He shifted and settled himself and I did the same until we both faced Mecca. Then he started to pray in a language I didn't understand. But his words helped me to feel better than I had all day.


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \------------  
> Author Note: Be prepared for emotional dimwit-age, on the part of both boys. They're teenagers - what more do you want?
> 
> This chapter was a pain in the butt, and I'm not so happy with it - it's clumsy. But it serves its purpose.

Carry an apple in my pocket  
I write reminders on my skin  
Clip meaningless pictures from old magazines  
I tape them to the walls  
It's a bad place I'm in  
_-" All Up the Seething Coast" m.g._  
  
Duo came back two weeks later - longer than he said he'd be away, and just long enough for me to suspect that he'd been off-planet for at least a few of those days. The fourteen days waiting for him to return seemed longer than most other days.  
  
I had just finished a lunch shift in the kitchen, my face and coveralls coated with what felt like several pounds of grease, when I spotted him in the common room, his back to me, reading one of the inspirational posters taped to the wall. I'd been headed back to my cell to change, but stopped to watch him as he reached a hand behind his head to rub the back of his neck beneath his braid. It was such a familiar gesture that I had to laugh a little. I remembered him doing it even on the lunar base, when his hands were in heavy shackles. He must have heard the small noise I made because he turned swiftly, a tentative smile spreading across his mouth. His eyes traveled quickly over me, coming back up to my eyes after he'd made sure I still had all ten fingers and good posture.  
  
"Hey buddy," he said, voice barely above a whisper.  
  
"Hi," I said automatically. Then after a beat, "Thanks for coming back."  
  
"Sure," he answered. "Sorry it took me longer than I said it would. There was stuff I had to take care of before I could come."  
  
He looked different, I realized; there was something that made him appear more solid than before. "It's no problem."  
  
He took a couple steps closer and he seemed to be holding himself a bit more stiffly than usual. Duo had always moved like gravity didn't apply to him the way it did to the rest of us, like he had a bargain with it, allowing his steps to be lighter, essentially silent. Standing in front of me now, his boots seemed firmly planted, his shoulder squared to remain still, like he couldn't have moved the way he used to even if he wanted to. It'd only been two weeks, but something was different.  
  
"You're tan. Why are you tan?"  
  
He jumped a little at the outburst and then looked down at his arms like he wasn't sure whether they belonged to him. His arms had been folded across his chest, an unusual position for him. When he straightened them to examine his skin, I noticed that his hands were filthy and that there was dirt packed in under his fingernails.  
  
"I should wash my hands," he said instead of answering my question. "Can I use the sink in the corner?"  
  
I nodded. "Yeah. I have to wash up, too. I'll be right back; wait for me?"  
  
He nodded in reply and turned back to the poster as I left. I jogged back to the cell block, pulling the bulky gray apron over my head as I went. I tossed it in the laundry heap as I came into the cell, and looking down at myself, deciding that it had done an admirable job of keeping my coveralls clean. They didn't need to be washed yet, so I shrugged out of the sleeves and tied them around my waist. Then I went to the sink and scrubbed the grime off my face and neck, rinsing as much kitchen sweat from my arms as I could with splashed water. My hair was filthy, but it would have to wait. Visiting hours lasted only so long. On my way back out of the cell, I grabbed the pack of cloves he'd brought me two months ago for my birthday, along with a pack of matches. I hadn't touched them since, though Karl had smoked a handful.  
  
When I got back to the common room, Duo was hunched over the utility sink scrubbing his hands. His braid had slid over his shoulder to hang in front of him, and he seemed to be concentrating fiercely, as though he'd just realized they were dirty and was embarrassed. But Duo didn't get embarrassed - at least he hadn't in the three-odd years I'd known him. I took another step toward him and his back tensed. He turned around casually enough but I could see he was ready for a fight if I'd been someone else.  
  
"Let's go outside, Maxwell, before you get me into trouble again."  
  
He flinched and dried his hands on his pants. "Cheap shot."  
  
"Yeah, sorry."  
  
He didn't say anything else as we walked through the common room and between the guards on our way to the yard. The only table in the shade was occupied by old Alliance men I didn't know, so we avoided them, sitting at a table closer to the basketball courts.  
  
As soon as he was seated, Duo let his posture droop, letting out a wheezing sigh. "It is too fucking hot here, Chang. We're both gonna have skin cancer by the time you get out of this place." He shoved his t-shirt sleeves higher up on his shoulders and pulled his braid off his neck. "My delicate complexion can't take it."  
  
I snorted a laugh and slid the pack of cloves across the table to him. "Then get off-planet, space brat, if you can't hack a southern Italy summer."  
  
He plucked a cigarette from the pack and took the matches I offered him. He lit the clove and then tossed the match into the burnt grass, watching as a few blades smoked and shriveled. "I'm tryin', buddy."  
  
I took the pack and pulled out another cigarette. Duo struck a match for me, cupping it in his palm against the faint breeze. I wasn't sure whether he meant trying to get off earth or trying to tolerate the weather in Italy. I sucked clumsily until the thing caught and then blew a cloud of sweet smoke right in Duo's face. "Sorry," I muttered as he wrinkled his nose and gave an exaggerated cough. When he sucked on the cigarette, I heard the cloves crackle and, again, watched him smile and lick the sweet taste from his lips. I realized I was staring at his mouth when I felt him staring at me and I jerked my gaze back up to his.  
  
"Why?" I asked quickly.  
  
He looked blank for a moment. "'Why' what?"  
  
"How long have you been dirt-side?" I asked, backing the conversation up a few steps. He looked away quickly.  
  
"For a bit. Didn't see much point heading back to L2 for the few weeks between your birthday and the, um, the 13th. Seemed like a lot of running."  
  
"It's what you usually do. Howard needs your help, doesn't he?" I didn't want to press the issue, didn't like seeing him uncomfortable, but his unease was something new.  
  
He shrugged. "Howard said he could handle the sweepers while I worked a few jobs north of Rome. The latest is an acquaintance of his, and it's actually a lot closer, within an hour of here." He looked to me, characteristic grin back and in full effect. "And by 'acquaintance,' I mean 'former sweetheart' - this lady could make the little palm trees on Howard's shirts dance with the way she talks." I raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. "Not really my type, though. She could be my mother, or maybe grandmother depending on what colony cluster we're talking about. Anyway, she's got a sweet scrap yard and a serious back log of repair jobs, so..."  
  
"So, that explains your hands and your tan," I said with a smirk. He cast a glance at his fingernails and grinned.  
  
"It would also explain my muscular physique." He struck a ridiculous pose, cigarette dangling from his lips. Then he winced and rubbed his shoulder. "And why I'm so sore I can barely walk. This manual labor shit in full gravity is killing me. The first week I thought my back was gonna break." I nodded and elected not to share my similar experience working in the laundry those first few days. I watched him take the cigarette from his mouth and rest his wrist on the table, noticing that the muscles in his arms did look more solid, liked they'd been dealing in full-gravity work days.  
  
"Do you like the job?" I asked.  
  
He nodded, flicking ash into the grass. "Yeah, Sam's a great gal - pretty scary, but great. She's a brilliant mechanic and..." He trailed off again and looked away before continuing. "And she said she could always use the help if I was around, which was her way of saying she likes how I work."  
  
I sat up a little straighter. "What do you think you'll do?" The prospect of having Duo dirt-side more often was appealing. He did spend a lot of time traveling; it might be better for him to have a place that he could go back to that wasn't the space-port and his shuttle. With only a year left on my sentence, he could get more work done, but not sacrifice too much of his time hanging out at the dead end of Europe.  
  
"I'm not sure; I might take her up on it." He glanced up at me again, not wanting to look for my reaction, but curious all the same.  
  
And even though I'd just been thinking that it would be nice to have Duo closer more often, my mouth opened and said otherwise because I'm an idiot who can't stand the thought that someone would actually do something like move to Italy for me. "Well, don't... don't sacrifice other, more profitable opportunities just so you can spend more time here. There's nothing going on here; you'd be bored out of your skull. It probably wouldn't be worth it."  
  
It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it the second it came out of my mouth. His eyes snapped back to mine and his brow dipped down into a slow-forming frown.  
  
"Not that I wouldn't appreciate the gesture, but-"  
  
"Gesture?"  
  
Wrong again.  
  
He looked like he couldn't believe what I had just said. I almost reminded him who he was talking to. I didn't understand how Onur could think that my friends made me tolerable. I wouldn't tolerate me if I were them. "You think this," and he pointed to the space between us, "is a gesture? You think Trowa and Heero transferring to the branch office in Rome was a gesture?"  
  
"No, I-"  
  
"Chang, they put their lives on hold for you. You think anything happens in Rome? You think they do anything other than push papers from one desk to the next and occasionally bust some bonehead for carrying an unlicensed firearm or selling one vacation's worth of dope? And me... you think it's good for my reputation as a sweeper and a damn talented mechanic to associate closely with a convicted war criminal? Do you even know how many jobs I've lost because of who you are and what you tried to do in that second, fucking stupid war?"  
  
"I didn't mean to-" I started, knowing already that there was no way to derail this train.  
  
"Yes, you did, Chang. I know you feel guilty for dragging us all out here to the middle of fucking nowhere, but you didn't drag us. We're big boys and we came here on our own. But it's a very nice gesture on your part to release us from our obligation to you. Now I can go tell Trowa and Heero that they can stop taking vacation days to come down here and see you, and that they can finally pack up and go back to Brussels where they can actually do something useful. Heero can quit driving himself crazy behind his desk, blaming himself for not getting to you sooner during the war, for not convincing you that you were being an ass. And Trowa can quit worrying about your nutrition half the time and keeping Heero from self-destructing the other half and start taking care of himself for once. And I-"  
  
I'd tried to look away multiple times, but he bent and contorted his neck so he could see my face, and finally I let him go at it. His words were burning themselves into my brain anyway, so I figured I might as well let his eyes do the same.  
  
"I could- I could go home and find Hilde wherever she ended up after I left her to fly with Howard. Or I could go to school, maybe read my first novel or make my first shitty sculpture in art class. We would all be really grateful if you let us forget that one of us is gone for good and that you're where we can't get to you. We could forget you both and get on with your lives. So, thank you for letting me know you feel guilty about all of it, and thanks for your concern regarding my financial situation, but I'm perfectly aware I wouldn't make shit working for Sam, and I'm pretty sure Trowa and Heero knew they'd be bored in Rome. I'm positive that the point of taking those positions wasn't to make you feel guilty. "  
  
He puffed furiously on his cigarette and then made a face, when he found it'd burned down to the filter. "Fuck," he muttered, flicking it into the grass. He raked a hand through his bangs and then dropped his elbow on the table, resting his head in his hand. "Fuck, that was more than I meant to say."  
  
"Duo, I didn't mean to insult you or trivialize what you and the others-"  
  
"It's not just for you, you know?" He looked up. "I mean, it is for you, but it's for us, too. It's just Heero, Trowa, and me, and-"  
  
"Three isn't enough," I finished.  
  
"Right, exactly. Four is just barely cutting it. None of us are happy. I feel like we're all on the edge of something really bad, something dark. If something happened to you-"  
  
I looked down at where he'd just grabbed my wrist. "It won't, Duo," I said, needing him to believe me, needing to believe it myself, urgently needing it. "Nothing's going to happen with Yuy and Barton in Rome and you five miles down the road working at some junk heap."  
  
He squeezed my wrist until my skin pinched painfully and the bones ached. Then he let go. "It's twenty miles from here and it's a salvage yard," he said, sounding worn out.  
  
"Whatever."  
  
"Wu," he began, looking at me with big sober eyes, trying to convey something heavy and genuine. "I'm thinking of taking the salvage job with Sam."  
  
"I thought you were already working for her," I murmured, knowing that wasn't what he meant.  
  
"I'd take the job for the next year, for the remainder of your sentence. She's got some space over the garage where I could crash. There's a truck I can borrow to get up to the see the guys and to come down here. I think it would be smart to have us all closer together, within a couple hours."  
  
I stubbed out the butt of the clove, realizing I'd barely smoked any of it. I set it carefully between my middle finger and thumb and tried to flick it away like Karl did, like he'd tried to show me how to do. I failed miserably and it shot to the side, narrowly missing Duo's ear. I scowled. "Sorry."  
  
When I looked up at him, he was smiling again. "Neat trick," he smirked.  
  
"I worked a long time on that one," I said. He laughed, and I felt the tension ease a little. "Did you decide to stay after you got in that fight with Trowa on the 13th?"  
  
He shrugged and looked just a little disgruntled at the memory. "Guy knows how to guilt trip better than Sister Helen, but without the nice hugs afterward." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'd already met up with Sam by that point; she's been a client of Howard's and she had some stuff for me to pick up. And we had started talking about me doing a few repair jobs for her, but yeah, Trowa did a lot of the persuading. I just had to get back out to space to settle a few things with Howard before it was finalized."  
  
"That doesn't seem like Trowa," I commented. "He worries, but he doesn't bully."  
  
"Like I said, Wu, we're not in a good spot right now, any of us. Trowa knows it, and he knows he can't look after Heero and you on his own."  
  
"He can't look after me, and neither can you. You have no power here, especially when you start waving badges around."  
  
He wasn't about to be dissuaded now. "But it would be better if we were all here, to circle the wagons. In a manner of speaking," he added when I rolled my eyes at him. "And you've only got a year left here. You need to start thinking again about where you want to go after you get out. Maybe start sending out applications to a few universities. You think they wouldn't want you, now, but you're wrong. You're smart as hell and with your experiences, you'd be the best student any of those places could find. They'd get to say they started Chang Wufei on his path to intellectual greatness!" He was excited by the possibilities, but he was still nervous, looking a little manic.  
  
He was easier to read these days. He smiled a lot less, and when he did, they were one of two kinds of smiles: genuine and fake. During the wars and right after, he had all manner of smiles, so many that I couldn't tell them apart. He used them all the time and they'd served him well. Now, he either meant it or he didn't. After Quatre died and after I ended up here, he didn't give the one kind unless he really meant it.  
  
"Duo, did something happen?"  
  
He rubbed his palms in his eyes and buried his fingers in his hair, pulling a few chunks out of the braid so that they stood up in random bumps and loops. "I feel like we already had this conversation the last time I was here, like this is all we can talk about until you get out - fight off panic and unload why we should be panicking."  
  
"What should we be panicking about now?" I asked in growing alarm. "Is it Heero? Did he do something after you all left last time?"  
  
Duo shook his head and then shrugged. "That was a bad day for him, but Trowa knows how to handle it. I think they went to the shooting range, and then they were gonna train for awhile."  
  
"Then what is it?"  
  
"I don't know!" he shouted. "If I knew, I would have already fixed it or I would have killed it! There's nothing specific at all, just the shit I told you about the last time I was here alone, and some I can only feel. I mean, it's not that bad all the time, and I think Trowa and Heero have gotten a little better actually, since they've been partners." He grabbed for the cloves. "You weren't there right after everything blew up in our faces. Obviously, you weren't. I thought Trowa would turn to stone, or if not that, something less dramatic. I thought he'd disappear - just, be gone one day. And I thought Heero would either blow his brains out, or do something equally destructive to the rest of us. But they didn't do any of those things. They've gotten better. So - it's strange, and maybe stupid. I just feel like since the wars, everyone's watching us to see if we really do self-destruct, if we really can't handle the peace."  
  
"They're certainly watching me," I muttered. "It's not an outrageous suspicion."  
  
He lit the cigarette and glanced around the yard, eyes catching on and then sliding away from the groups of men gathered at tables and playing basketball. "Here's what I think," he started. "The five of us were always wild cards, but by the end of the first war, we were the only ones who could finish it. The five of us together changed history, kept Psycho Marquise from dumping himself and his ship onto earth. We were heroes! But after it was all over, we stuck around. They still had the wild cards in their hands - the Earth Sphere and the colonies. And now, if we're the ones in trouble, if we aren't handling our retirement well, no one wants to get stuck with us. Wild cards are a bitch if you hold onto them for too long."  
  
He looked for my reaction, looked for my understanding. I heard my sarcastic reply before I could haul it back.  
  
"Excellent metaphor, Duo."  
  
He looked away and gave a humorless laugh, disgusted with me. "Fuck you."  
  
I decided that right then was as good a time as any to add in Karl's and my conspiracy theory, the reason I'd asked Duo to return. "There was a man here, a White Fang organizer from L2. His name was Benjamin Bennett. Did you know him?"  
  
Duo shrugged. "The L2 volunteers wanted me to join up with them. I remember the name - don't know if I spoke with him."  
  
"He was killed about two months ago, found dead in his cell, with no evidence of a struggle."  
"Sorry to hear it."  
  
"We were all drugged the night it happened. There were no witnesses that we know of. Two years before him, Vasil Wasyliw, one of the original colony rebel leaders was knifed in the showers while he was alone, not actually showering."  
  
"So what."  
  
"I think both deaths were for political reasons, and I think members of this facility's administration are responsible, though faction violence is the story they're telling."  
  
"Any reason to believe it wasn't faction violence?" he asked, sounding for all the world like a Preventer at an uninteresting crime scene.  
  
As a strategy for communicating that I intimately understood what he'd been trying to get me to see, providing evidence that went along with his story wasn't working so well yet.  
  
"Suspicious circumstances surrounding their deaths. Did I mention we were drugged?"  
  
His gaze slid back to mine. Then he shrugged. "Happens all the time I'd imagine, whenever some search that's not so routine needs doing. Did you check all your stuff the next morning? Did you check yourselves?" He gave me a half-hearted leer, and I flushed. "What else have you got?" he asked when I didn't rise to that bait.  
  
"They were both leaders, powerful ones."  
  
He shook his head. "Two dead bodies isn't a pattern, even if they were leaders."  
  
"Is three?"  
  
"Depends on who the third is. Are there three?"  
  
"What if the third is Quatre?"  
  
He groaned and stared hard at his cigarette. "Here I thought I was the one losing it."  
  
"What if the fourth and fifth have already happened somewhere else to people I don't know about because we don't get the news channel on our TV?"  
  
"Come on, Wu, you're-"  
  
"What if number six is me?"  
  
Angry blue eyes met mine. "Don't."  
  
"Or you? Duo, you travel between Earth and L2 on your own shuttle, associating with three ex-terrorists. You said yourself I've cost you jobs; what if I cost you... something infinitely more important? They can watch me here. They can't watch you, especially now that you've installed banned technology in your ship. You'd be easier to eliminate than to watch."  
  
He started to shake his head.  
  
"Duo, I think it's exactly as you said. We - you and me and a bunch of us in here - we are the wild cards, the ones who had power, who had friends, who had... politics - the radicals, the zealots, the believers who believed too hard after we were supposed to stop. What if they're getting rid of the wild cards?" He laughed at his own words thrown back at him. "It's bad and it's dark, just beyond where we can see, and it's just like you said."  
  
He squinted against the hot afternoon sun. "Christ, I wasn't expecting you to have your own spooky story to add to mine. Maybe we really should be panicking."  
  
I returned his stare. "Maybe we should."  
  
The sounds of the yard filled my ears, and I looked away to give him some space to think. I pictured Karl's pale face flushed with excitement. I'd practically been speaking for him, channeling his obsessive curiosity and paranoia. I didn't know whether Vasil's death was connected to Benji's and neither did he. I wasn't really deceiving Duo by claiming that his death fit, because it did - I was asking for his help.  
  
"So... what, you want me to help you figure out who's killing war criminals? You want me to interrogate a few guards, pull some files, check some date books for 'drug inmates and execute Benjamin Bennett?' 'Cause, I gotta say, that kinda shit will really cut in on my hours with Sam." His fingers tapped restlessly on the table.  
  
"I want you to find us a pattern."  
  
He shook his head. "Anyone can find a pattern if they're looking for one. You need proof."  
  
"Then help me find that!" I snapped. "You said yourself that we need to see it coming from now on. Quatre took us completely by surprise, so did what happened to me. I'm trying to see what's coming next."  
  
He blew out a cloud of smoke. "I know, buddy."  
  
"Then you believe me, don't you. You know something is wrong."  
  
He nodded, acceptance and resignation in his posture. I was calling him back to the fight, and he wasn't happy to go. "It's hanging over all our heads like a mean ghost. I think Trowa and Heero can feel it too, even though they're so far inside they can't-"  
  
The dynamic changed then. We weren't trying to convince each other of anything, trying to prove a point or argue some outrageous claim. We were agreeing, recognizing that the world was not right, and that we'd chosen a side. Again. Duo was no longer just vaguely suspicious or uneasy. He was like me, and as far as most of the world was concerned, that was the wrong side to choose. What I was asking him to do was stupidly dangerous for someone who had much more to lose than I did.  
  
"They're probably in the safest place they can be," I interrupted, "right where Relena's new government can see them, with bright perfect records and starched uniforms. And if you had any sense, you would have signed up as soon as you had the chance." He raised an eyebrow at me, but I plowed ahead, noting distantly that I sounded a bit like my mother. "You should have taken Une's offer of a full-time position with Preventers. What you do now is dangerous - too many shady customers who could have dangerous motives, who could be trying to set you up. And that ship of yours; god only knows how it's still running after everything you've done to it. Frequent space travel still isn't safe for small vessels like that. For that reason alone I'm glad you're going to be spending more time on Earth, though I'm not sure living twenty miles from here is the safest place you could have chosen to settle down for a year. But at least-"  
  
He grabbed my wrist again, though this time not so tightly. When I stopped talking, I noticed that he was smiling - one of the real ones. "Wufei, I appreciate that you're concerned about my safety. I'm glad that you are. It's kind of cute, actually." His smile widened when he saw me flush and glare at him. "But listen to yourself for a minute. You're worried about my safety when, first off, you're in a prison calling itself a school, where the guys who were war leaders are winding up dead, and second, you've taken it upon yourself to find out why they're winding up dead. If you're right, and the big shots at RCNP are behind it, then you're going to need help. You're talking about taking on the state... again. And this time there's only two of us, instead of five." The silence that followed was heavy as life. Then Duo's eyes flickered over to the door into the common room. "Unless that skinny guy over there counts as three."  
  
I spun around quickly, already knowing who I'd find. And sure enough, Karl stood in the shade of the overhang, smoking a cigarette and looking like a kid whose parents wouldn't let him sit at the grownup table.  
  
"I noticed you said 'us' at one point, before you asked me for my help."  
  
"That's Karl," I said quickly. "He's my friend."  
  
Duo's eyes traveled back and forth between us. "Yeah?"  
  
"He's also the insomniac who found out for sure we'd been drugged."  
  
"Who else have you told about me?" he asked, eyes sharpening.  
  
I rolled my eyes. "Do you think I'm an idiot? He's the only one who knows. He's the one who got me suspicious in the first place."  
  
"Fine, fine," he said, waving a hand, dismissing any explanation I had. "But I'll tell you right now; anything I find, I bring it to you. He wants anything from me, you ask. I only talk to you. He stays at least that far away."  
  
I frowned and watched them eye each other from across the yard. "Okay."  
  
His eyes came back to mine, hard and hooded. "I should go. Sam's got me working in the morning and I need to get my laptop updated and upgraded with Heero's latest gadgets so I can start working for you at night. It'll probably take awhile to put together so I should start before dark."  
  
"Duo-"  
  
"I'll find you a pattern by next week," he said, standing abruptly, and stepping over the bench seat of the picnic table. He might have left right then without another word if I hadn't grabbed his elbow and pulled him to a stop.  
  
"Duo-"  
  
He spun around so fast that I almost ran straight into him. His eyes burned with sober wariness. "Wufei, please tell me you're not two bored kids, looking for some way to pass your last year here. Tell me that you don't want me to just be your news ticker or a window to the outside. Tell me you're scared and that you need my help." The extremes of his emotions from one moment to the next were hard to keep up with. I floundered where I stood.  
  
"I-"  
  
"That you need it, Chang." He shook his arm out of my grip, but stayed right in my space. Fortunately, I'd grown a few inches since the wars, too, and could look him almost directly in the eye. Duo's brow sloped down in a tight frown. "Tell me something reassuring, because this has been a rough couple of weeks, and it'd be great if you could just..." He trailed off and lowered his head, now slumping a little.  
  
I struggled with what to say, painfully aware of the men's stares from the basketball court. They'd heard Duo raise his voice; they'd seen him try to walk away. "I do need your help," I murmured, bringing my mouth close to his ear. "And I am frightened."  
  
"That's not very reassuring," he whispered.  
  
"It's the most I can offer you, Duo." For a moment, I felt his breath falter on my skin and he shifted, coming a half-step closer, our hips lining up. I almost stepped back, but didn't, trying to get him to look at me though his eyes stayed focused on my chest. He reached for my arm, and then I did step away, pulse suddenly hammering in my ears. I gripped his shoulder and held him from me. "You're right; you should go."  
  
He looked flushed and unhappy, but he nodded. "I'll see what I can find in the papers first, look for the easy stuff, and I'll get back to you, okay?"  
  
"Thank you, Duo." He nodded again and walked away, hands in his pockets.  
  
I didn't watch him leave, but turned to the men still watching me from the court. A few of them were glancing between me and Duo's retreating figure, sneering suggestively. Relationships in this place were always complicated. They hadn't been for me, because not letting anyone near me tended to keep things simple. What they had just seen redrew the boundaries for them, which was not good news for me.  
  
"So that's who you've been holding out for, is it? Should have known you'd think you were too good for any of us in here."  
  
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that Duo was out of sight. Then I tilted my chin up and beckoned with one hand. "Need me to prove it to you again?"


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

The door swung open easily.  
We sauntered into the poorly lit store,  
and looked around lazily.  
We stole every bit of candy they had inside.  
_\- The Recognition Scene M.G._  
  
Karl watched with bright, almost feverish eyes as I selected what I would eat for dinner. Moving through the food line, he barely paused to take notice of what he was dumping on his plate, while I carefully steered clear of the chicken and gravy and picked out the pieces of broccoli which looked like they'd retained the most nutrients after being blasted in the steamer. The mashed potatoes were instant and therefore useless, but they filled me up so I spent a few seconds struggling with the serving spoon, trying to the get the fake potatoes to come off. I grabbed a roll with butter and a fruit cup, then headed for a table, Karl right at my heels. He sat down across from me and watched me unfold my napkin and take a few sips of water. I watched him too, though with a bit more subtlety.  
  
He hadn't been sleeping at all lately, and it showed. He usually looked a little strung out, but for the last few days, he'd gotten kind of gray, his eyes looking larger and bluer than usual. His eyelids were nearly translucent, and beneath them, he had smudges like bruises. Rorty prescribed him sleeping meds, but as far as I knew, he didn't take them, not unless he got really desperate and the other inmates started complaining that he was keeping them up as well.  
  
He tapped his utensil against his plate and watched me spread a liberal amount of butter over the roll. Meticulously distributing the rest of it on my broccoli followed with a heavy dusting of pepper, I watched him grow more and more twitchy. I was about to put the first floret into my mouth when he reached across the table, quick as a snake, and got his fingers around my throat, jerking me back in my seat. His breath quickened as his eyes slid sideways to see where I had the skewered broccoli and my spork pressed to the side of neck. His left eye twitched and his fingers squeezed experimentally, loosening almost immediately as I smeared buttered, mushy vegetable along the length of his jugular. He gave me a crooked smile, hiding the side of his mouth with the broken teeth and let go. Then he took a shuddering breath.  
  
"Would you like to tell me how your conversation with Duo went or do I have to try and scare it out of you?"  
  
"I'd love to tell you."  
  
"Would you also please remove your fucking spork and broccoli from my throat?" He made both of these requests in his most polite tone.  
  
"Sure," I answered, lowering my utensil and then pushing the food off it on the side of my plate. I looked up at him and could see that he was about ready to lunge again, doubtless frustrated that I was taking so long. "Little tense, Karl?" He raised an eyebrow as though to say, 'what does it look like, dipshit?' "Have you been spitting out the medicine Rorty prescribed for you again?"  
  
He had the decency to look a little sheepish, though he muttered. "You know I never swallow those things." He curled the long fingers of one hand around his water glass. "And if you don't tell me what happened with your friend, I can't guarantee I won't try to throttle you again."  
  
I ate a few bites of potato and reminded myself that, while I considered Karl my friend, he was a lot smarter than me and with a considerably more flexible sense of morality, he didn't win any 'most trustworthy' awards. He made me uncomfortable about as often as not. I met his tired gaze and he grinned.  
  
"Sorry - I wasn't raised to be patient."  
  
"No, you were raised to keep your hands clean and be important to the world."  
  
He feigned a wounded expression and then showed me his slightly sweating palms. "My hands were never clean. Now, is your friend going to help us, or not?"  
  
I took a bite of roll and waited to speak until I had chewed and swallowed. "Of course he'll help us. But I can't let him do anything that would endanger him, his job, or our friends." I looked down at my food and waited.  
  
Karl's grin was short-lived. "So... he's not going to help us, then."  
  
Not looking up, I smushed potatoes through the grooves in the spork. "I just said he was."  
  
"Not if you keep him from snooping in the places we can't go and reading what we can't read and speaking with the people we can't get near."  
  
I shook my head at my dinner and then met his gaze. "Karl, if the insidious plot to execute the remaining leaders from the war is really as insidious as you seem to think it is, then Duo's as good as dead if he talks to the wrong person or is found in the wrong place."  
  
"But he can at least run if he gets caught. He's got all of earth and space... we've got nowhere to go! We can do nothing here but wait to find the next body."  
  
I shrugged and didn't back down. "I won't let him take such a risk on our hunch that two men's deaths, two years apart, are connected. I want to figure it out as much as you, but I can't ask him to..." I caught abrupt movement over Karl's shoulder and lost my train of thought when I paused to see what it was. Then I took three large bites of potatoes, knowing it would be the last food I'd get until breakfast. "Dinner's over, Karl," I said, speaking with my mouth full. Etiquette was not the primary concern now.  
  
"What? Why?"  
  
"Basker and O'Malley on your six. They brought friends." His back went rigid, though he didn't turn around to see whether I was right or not. The dull roar of the mess hall began to quiet as the Romefellar bullies made their way through the tables.  
  
"They still coming this way?" he asked, following my lead and shoveling as much food down his throat as ten seconds allowed. I nodded and he groaned around a mouthful of chicken. He washed it down with a gulp of water and then stood up from the bench, scrubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. He turned to face them as they drew near.  
  
"Did you do something to warrant what's about to happen?" I asked, standing up from the table as well.  
  
"Oh, maybe. I guess. I don't know." He wasn't listening. He was watching O'Malley take the offensive with Basker and one of their buddies flanking him. O'Malley was tall, wiry and mean, with bright orange hair and a bunch of freckles that made him appear younger and nicer than he really was. Basker was the better fighter of the pair, but O'Malley always took the lead because, for some reason, he was always angrier.  
  
"Try not to-" Then they broke over him like a wave, in the process, shoving our table back into the wall. I just barely managed to scramble up onto the bench, avoiding seriously bruised shins or maybe a broken kneecap. The knot of men caught him and dragged him toward the middle of the mess hall, holding him by his clothes and his hair so he couldn't get his feet under him. His chin was already bleeding, most likely from where he'd hit the floor the first time before they picked him up.  
  
Basker and O'Malley were both irritatingly typical Romefellar thugs. They and the crowd they ran with were smart, but not too smart, strong but not very organized and vicious enough to make up for both of those shortcomings. They hadn't been high-ranking officers during the wars but they'd been devout followers, and they still held nothing but disgust for those who remained loyal to Treize even now, even here. They knew Karl held onto all that Treize stood for, they knew he was a little weird, and they knew that physically, he was no match for them.  
  
Karl's relationship with Basker and O'Malley was not difficult to understand; it bordered on cliche. But that didn't make their fights any less brutal or the stitches and bruises any less painful. I could recite from a psychology textbook exactly why these men went after Karl and others like him. I could explain the exact combination of lost individuality, independence, and masculinity mixed with a mean streak that put their anger and frustration over the edge often enough to give them the label "bullies." They were only attempting to reassert their will in a place bent on making them docile. However, knowing it and having it be true didn't help Karl in the least, so I did what I always did in these situations - climbed over the table and waded into the middle of everything. This tendency would be one of the reasons the Romefellar bullies sometimes came after me.  
  
More trouble for more fights really wasn't what I needed on my record this late in my sentence. But I knew that Karl wasn't in any kind of shape for a real fight, so it had to end before he was seriously injured. There were times when his basic training, coupled with a brain that could see five to eight steps ahead in every strategy, was enough to hold off the worst of their vindictive anger. Today was not one of those days.  
  
They had formed a ring with Karl and O'Malley at the center, and they let me through without much trouble. I recognized several of the men the Romefellar bullies had brought along. They recognized me too, probably from the many fights they'd been dragged into by their leaders. They watched me warily as I tried to assess how best to peel O'Malley off my friend. I saw Karl's knees buckle as he doubled over around a fist in his gut. He disappeared then, blocked by Basker and the other guy whose name I couldn't recall at the moment.  
  
"Bergsen!" I called. I didn't use his first name at times like these. "Bergsen, get up!"  
  
An angry voice from behind told me to help him up myself before shoving me hard between the shoulder blades. Suddenly, the reason they'd let me through so easily became clear. I stumbled forward and nearly tripped over Karl where he held himself on shaking hands and knees. I twisted around and landed beside him instead, ready to spring, and not at all liking how tall everyone looked from down on the floor.  
  
"Enjoying the show?" he bit out, his mouth bloody and his body unwilling to fight for him. I saw a kick aimed for his ribs and managed to grab him out of the way, jerking him backward onto his heels. They were shouting at us, yelling at me to get out of the way, though I didn't think they had any intention of letting me go without a struggle. They yelled at him to get up and fight them on his own.  
  
"Actually, the view from down here isn't so great," I replied.  
  
He laughed, an hysterical edge to his voice. I hooked my arms under his and started dragging him to his feet before another shove, this time with a heavy foot, sent us both sprawling. I landed on top of him and quickly slid off, feeling his wiry muscles coil for a strike that could just as easily have me as its target. I backed up against someone's legs and got to my feet just as he lashed out, taking out two men at the knees. They were on the ground before they could even shout their surprise. I kept my eyes on Karl's flailing limbs as both O'Malley and Basker tackled him again, so I didn't notice until he'd grabbed my arm that Onur was right beside me. By reflex, I jerked my elbow out of his grip and tilted my chin toward the blur of pale limbs and hair.  
  
"Did you bring friends, because I think we need them today." He nodded, a scowl dragging down the corners of his mouth.  
  
"This is utterly irresponsible on Karl's part."  
  
"They started it."  
  
"Ah. Just as those men on the courts yesterday started that fight by looking at you the wrong way."  
  
I leveled a glare at my roommate. "They weren't just looking. Trust me. And can you deliver this daily lecture later?"  
  
He rumbled a growl that I heard over the dull roar of the mess hall and then shoved me forward back into the fight. Basker caught my eye and pushed one of his lackies at me, but I grabbed the kid's arm in my left, pulling him directly in front of me, and knocked him down with my right, stepping over him to get to his leader. I kept my fists open, swatting away Basker's heavy punch and thumping him in the chest with the heel of my palm. He staggered back, and before he could regroup, I grabbed hold of Karl's collar and tried prying him away from O'Malley. Both of them were a mess, so it wasn't clear who was winning. I knelt down beside him just as a few of Onur's White Fang buddies and a pair of well-known Treize loyalists materialized around us, forming a solid barrier of muscle and surly attitude to keep everyone away from us at the center of the brawl.  
  
"Come on, Bersen," I called, tugging a bit harder to get him out of O'Malley's grip, abruptly leaning out of the way as he whipped around, a bony elbow aimed at my nose. His eyes were wild and furious, the left now rimmed in the beginnings of a bruise as well as smudges of exhaustion. He grinned his broken grin, teeth turned pink with blood. "Come on," I said again. "Guards are headed over to break this up. We need to move." Karl finally twitched a shrug and with Onur keeping O'Malley down - weighing probably twice as much as him - the two of us scrambled away, the pair of Treize loyalists at our backs.  
  
"But I was winning, Chang," he said, breathless. "I don't win very often."  
  
"You wouldn't have stayed winning if we waited any longer," I grumbled. "Get up; they're coming."  
  
Whistles cut through the air, ringing in my ears as they got closer. One of the downfalls of using an old correctional facility with a big open mess hall was that officer control, if not present at the start of the fight, was difficult to add into the mix. Meal times were supervised, but not on the ground. The fights that didn't stay small really got going by the time the law moved in to break them up. And since there were so many of us, the guilty parties involved were sometimes difficult to single out, a fact we took thorough advantage of at times like this.  
  
We stayed low, watching the crowd divide as the guards pushed their way through. The men split the same way every time, clearly marking out who had fought whom in the wars. Trouble was, I'd never aligned myself with any of them, and very few of them ever allowed me to stand with them anyway. If none of my friends were involved in the fight, I was usually left out in the cold.  
  
But today Onur fought his way over to us, grabbing my arm as he passed, hauling me upright. I barely had time to get a hold of Karl, one arm slung around his middle, before we were both dragged back in amongst other former White Fang. Karl and I stayed down, pressed close together by the other men standing around us.  
  
"Clean yourself up quick," I murmured. "You're a mess." Karl didn't need shit from frustrated guards in addition to the pounding from his usual bullies. He used his white undershirt to scrub at the blood on his face, managing to smear away a fair portion of it, so that his skin was mostly just stained the color of rust. With his other hand, he straightened his mussed hair. I touched the blotchy red skin under his eye and he jumped. I knew he was ready to snap again, and for some reason, probably having to do with the enjoyable adrenalin rush I was still riding, I left my fingers there even after the flinch. "That'll be a nice bruise by morning," I said.  
  
Karl gave a lopsided grin and then twitched away from me. "Does it look like I got it while winning a fight, or having my ass handed to me?"  
  
I shrugged. "Tough call. I'll be sure to spread it around that you had the upper hand when we broke it up."  
  
He arched an eyebrow. "Spreading rumors involves talking to people and we both know you don't do that."  
  
Another shrug. "I'll tell Onur, and he'll help you out."  
  
Hearing his name, my roommate hissed down at us to shut up and stay still. A moment later, one of the guards who loved to lecture launched into one of his speeches about individual and group responsibility. We all needed to take charge of our own actions and think about the consequences and yet we also had to look out for each other and form bonds that would prevent such things from-- and so on. I wasn't sure what kinds of positive bonds were being formed in this place, but I knew which ones were being preserved. White Fang's solid ranks stood around us, more than a little hostile to our presence at their feet. Romefellar stood glaring on the other side with pockets of old Alliance, OZ, and colony rebels strewn about. Mariemaia's army formed the perimeter, pretending they weren't interested in any of the proceedings.  
  
As the guard's speech began to wind down, the men lost interest and started to shuffle around, making their way back to the cell blocks for the two hours of study time before curfew. Karl and I got carefully to our feet and, keeping our heads down, stayed among the ranks of men filing out of the mess hall.  
  
We made it back before Onur, so I followed Karl into his single room, watching from the door as he washed out his mouth and wiped away the rest of the blood from his face. He had one of the few singles in the facility for the simple reason that his roommate would have gotten as little sleep as Karl, making for two half-crazy inmates instead of just one. Most of the time, I think solitude suited Karl fine; most of the time I envied him, wishing that I could do something as simple as take a piss without someone hearing or watching.  
  
Today, however, I wasn't so sure he appreciated the emptiness of his own room. I watched him scrub the blood from his mouth and chin, thinking that, while he did make me nervous by occasionally threatening my physical safety with those long fingers, he was the most interesting person I knew here and I didn't want to lose that because he finally lost it. Eventually he turned to look at me, eyes glancing away as soon as they landed to the walls of his room, to the bed and back to me.  
  
"I'm never gonna get to sleep now, Chang," he muttered. "Not after that. And if I don't sleep tonight, they might make me swallow those pills." He looked away, twitching a little. "Hold my nose and check under my tongue to make sure I really took them. Stick their fingers further into my head and-" He wriggled his fingers absently, voice pitched lower. "Scramble them all around until I don't care about anything and I won't know you, and those Romefellar..." His fingers squeezed into fists. "...fucks can pound the shit out of me and I won't even notice."  
  
"Karl-"  
  
"They'll keep killing us off one by one with night-time assassinations or sleeping pills or fucking hypnosis." He looked up at me. "I don't know how else your roommate could buy into this bullshit so thoroughly." His voice was rising steadily, and feeling like a cowardly shit, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure not too many people were paying attention to it - even though his words resonated in my chest with truth. "They've got us so completely, Wufei. They're in our heads more than anywhere else." With those two sentences, he sounded sad and resigned and older than 21.  
  
"You should calm down," I snapped, trying for authoritative. "There's no one in you head besides you. Those pills don't change who you are; they just help you to sleep."  
  
Karl barked a laugh and took an aggressive step towards me. With my back to the door and the sound of my roommate arriving in our cell, I knew I was in no danger, but I couldn't help a small half-step back. "Ah, I see. So, what if they decided that the forms you practice in the mornings and the sparring sessions you have with Yuy are elevating your physical fitness beyond everyone else's and they start mashing up muscle relaxers in your food or they give you Prednisone and your body turns to mush, just so they can control it a little better. Oh, but those pills don't change you, do they? They just make you a little less tense." He took another step forward. "My brain's all I've got, Chang. I don't feed it sedatives."  
  
I threw up a hand to keep him away. "Right, I get it - no sleeping pills. Fine."  
  
He looked down at my hand, his chest a few inches from my palm. "They don't even need to watch us anymore," he muttered. "You ever wonder why they leave us all together in that giant mess hall without more than a few guards on duty behind the cameras way up at the ceiling?" He paused, but I had nothing to say. "Because we break up our own fights. We've got people like Onur to discipline us - we do it ourselves!" He laughed, gesturing toward the yard. "There probably aren't even guards in those towers anymore, if there ever were to begin with!"  
  
His hand darted out, latching around my wrist. Too shocked and far too curious to pull back, I let him drag me forward. He held my wrist up, my arm bent at the elbow and wouldn't let me look away. His narrow chest fluttered up and down with soft ragged breaths, and he twitched damp blond hair from his eyes. I knew what he wanted maybe even before he did.  
  
"We can't always do exactly what they want, can we? Basker and O'Malley are bullies to be different, to feel strong. Why not us?"  
  
"We should be bullies?" The weakness of my voice was disgusting. Two years ago, I would have found a way to strangle it out of me. Two years ago, it probably wouldn't have existed at all.  
  
Karl's eyes searched mine, lit up with the prospect of breaking another rule. "Get a fucking clue, Chang," he said before shoving me hard against the metal bedpost and crushing his mouth over mine. One hand still around my wrist, he tried to get my arm over my head, but I growled against his lips and he left it pressed against the top bunk. He leaned forward into the kiss, keeping about a foot of space between us. It was probably the most awkward thing I'd ever done, and as first kisses went, it left much to be desired. He bit and sucked at my lips until I opened them, and then shoved his tongue into my mouth, pushing at my shoulder with his other hand, squeezing with dangerous fingers. When his hand started to drift down to the sleeves of my jumpsuit, I fully recognized what was about to happen. Two years of no contact with another person. Actually, most of a lifetime of no contact with another person, since Meiren and I never consummated our marriage - she was only thirteen for fuck sake. Disturbingly erotic dreams and my own hand were the only experience I had in these matters, and that era was about to come to an abrupt end if I let his hand go any further south. Perhaps it should have been someone other than Karl who did it, someone I trusted and really liked - someone female, at least.  
  
The list of both men and women who could fill the role of 'like and trust' was tiny, fitting on one hand... and not actually including any women. I could have loved Meiran, and I should have loved her better when she was alive. But being dead disqualified her from my list, as it did Quatre. Karl wasn't on it either, not really. But he was here and he was willing and eighteen seemed like as good a time as any to put an end to one era and begin another. So, I grabbed for his waist and pulled him flush against me, sucking the breath right out of his mouth at the feeling of another living, breathing, warm body pressed along mine.  
  
"Fuck," he groaned into my mouth, tilting his head to get a better angle, moving his free hand to the side of my neck. He had about an inch on me in height, just enough of an edge so our noses didn't get in the way. I tensed as his fingers wrapped loosely around my throat and I felt him smile. His lips tasted like copper. "We need to hurry," he murmured, turning his back to the door as more of the men passed on their way to their cells.  
  
I grunted an affirmative and he broke the kiss, bending down and lacing his fingers together over his knee. I stepped into his hands and he boosted me up onto the bunk. I shoved myself back across his blanket, kicking off my shoes and untying the sleeves from around my waist. My head hadn't fully gotten itself around what we were doing yet, I didn't think, but my body knew what was required of it. I extended a hand to Karl as he hoisted himself up onto the bed; then I pulled him on top of me, wanting nothing more than to feel skin and a heartbeat against my ribs and breath in my ear. He shrugged out of the jumpsuit sleeves and jerked his bloody t-shirt over his head with one frantic tug. Kneeling with one leg between mine, he reached one hand for the back of my knee, then he slid down, dragging his groin over mine. The breath left my lungs in one sharp gasp and my hips rolled up into his without any conscious thought on my part. The heavy fabric of our uniforms as well as underwear kept him from touching me, but the friction alone made my skin tingle at a thousand different points from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. With the hand that wasn't still hooked beneath my knee, he shoved my t-shirt up to my armpits and pressed his belly and chest flat against mine. His skin was damp with sweat and he winced as a few bruises pulled, but the feel of him, the solid weight of him drove me embarrassingly close to orgasm. I arched my neck back and he bit my collarbone hard enough to leave a mark. He pulled Duo's bandanna out of my hair and shoved it off the bed before I could grab for it. His hips thrusting against mine in a quick jagged rhythm, I knew that he was as close to finishing as me. I pressed my hand to his shoulder, pushing him back so that I could see his face, wanting to know what he looked like when he wasn't smirking or laughing or being his generally creepy self. His eyes were squeezed shut, hair swinging in time with the motion of his hips.  
  
"Karl, open your eyes. Look at me." Translucent lids flicked open, but his eyes were flat and unseeing, his fingers tightening as, suddenly, he curled forward over me, chin tucked nearly to his chest. His gasped-out curse and the knowledge of what he'd just done shoved me past any barrier of control I might have had left, and we nearly cracked skulls when my shoulders came off the mattress. It was surprising how much better this felt with another person involved, I thought dizzily when my head came to rest again on Karl's pillow. We shared several breaths, mouths only inches apart. He kissed me again, clumsily, sleepily.  
  
"Get out," he murmured against my lips, words and action jarringly disparate. "I think I can fall asleep now." He rested his head against my shoulder as he rolled to the side, giving me a nudge with his foot. His hand ran down from my chest to the waist band of my underwear and then he shoved my hip. "Thank you," he muttered.  
  
I blinked at him for the space of a few heartbeats, but his eyes were already closed, his breath slowing into a regular rhythm, so I rolled out off the bunk and dropped to the floor, picking up the bandanna where it lay and tying it over my thoroughly mussed hair. I watched the muscles in his battered face relax into sleep and then pulled the blanket over him, turning to leave when a guard loomed in the doorway.  
  
"He's asleep," I mouthed, and the guard, knowing what a rare occurrence that was, nodded and quickly left, probably to alert the rest of the staff to avoid Karl's cell for the night. He was gone quickly enough not to notice the state of my clothes and the blatant "just got off" glaze in my eyes. Onur would definitely notice both, so I spent the next few minutes cleaning up in Karl's sink before returning to my room.


	8. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \---------------  
> Warning for this chapter : Some ugliness.

The wax paper that I taped over the windows  
melted as quick as chocolate in the heat  
and it'll probably never come off now  
the windows look like frosted glass if you see them from the street  
and the dim light that filters through  
casts a new light on you  
and I, I wanna follow you all the way down this time  
I want to see what it is you're going down for  
_-Chinese House Flowers M.G._  
  
Sometimes I stayed late in the library. I didn't care much about my classes and the catalog wasn't particularly scintillating since the prison administration wasn't too keen on inspiring original or incendiary thought. But the library was quiet, and a good place to be if avoiding people - specifically roommates or neighbors - was in order. With curfew approaching, I would have to leave soon, but for the next half hour I could stay buried amongst the stacks and not face the two people who knew me well enough to know that I'd been thrown off my game - that I'd actually done it to myself.  
  
I busied myself with the lists of names Karl and I had been compiling since we started our investigation into Benji's death. This place being what it was, we couldn't very well go around asking about witnesses or motives or suspects; we couldn't do more than come up with our own list of people we thought might have done it or known the person or persons who had done it. And we could make guesses as to what sort of person might be next, if indeed Vasil's death two years ago was for the same reasons as Benji's - if indeed Benji was killed for political reasons.  
  
If I started thinking at any great length about how far out on a limb we were with this whole thing, I probably would have run directly to the row of phones out by the office and called up Duo to apologize for ever thinking of involving him in what was clearly a result of my and Karl's excessive paranoia and boredom. But that would be a really embarrassing thing to do, and Duo had already brought me copies of a few obits he thought I might find interesting, and they were actually interesting, though we could in no way tie them to either Benji or Vasil. And the fact remained that I'd piqued Duo's interest and he wasn't backing out now, even if I did call him and tell him to give it up.  
  
So, making sure to direct my thoughts away from the notion that I was wasting my time and putting my best friend in unnecessary danger, I went back to my lists. This particular list was not of potential suspects; this was a list of the inmates Karl and I thought might make likely targets. We'd divided the list into three categories: leaders during the wars, leaders here, and the men who were both. High-ranking office was not a requirement for making the first list. Some of the most influential leaders had been volunteers who'd never gone far up the chain of command. Some were rebels. The leaders here at RCNP we divided into positive and negative, those who drew people together, like Benji, and those who headed up bands of malcontents. These were mainly bitter old Alliance men and members of Mariemaia's army who had nobody else to talk to. Vasil and Benji both fit in the last category.  
  
Dividing up and classifying inmates regarding leadership abilities may or may not have been a valuable use of my time. I did have a paper to write for Friday - which would take me all of thirty minutes once I sat down and did it. And I needed to read a book for tomorrow. But neither of those things would serve to distract me enough from the real reason I was hiding out in the library. Onur knew something was up with me, and he was keeping watch more vigilantly than usual - for some reason still intent on making sure I didn't screw up too terribly. He was like an overachieving older brother who expected all the younger siblings to follow in his footsteps. I was an only child, but for a number of years Meiran had been like a younger sister before she was my wife, and I was beginning to have an idea of how she must have felt about me.  
  
And he suspected that something was up with me and Karl - which there was. Three times since that first time in his bunk, we'd gotten each other off, twice by hand, the third time with Karl on his knees. He hadn't asked me to reciprocate in kind that time, which was considerate because I probably wouldn't have been able to, embarrassingly strung out as I was after getting my first blow job. So far as I could tell, no one else knew about what Karl and I got up to, which was both good and also a missed opportunity of sorts - good because it wasn't anyone's business what we did and not so good because if Karl and I openly declared that we were in a relationship, then both he and I would get less trouble from the other men. If I staked a claim, so to speak, it could actually work out in our favor and we would become like any of the other pairs here. So, practically speaking, it would be the smart thing to do. But we hadn't talked about it, and honestly, I didn't think I wanted to be openly involved with Karl. First of all, I knew that Onur would think poorly of my decision. Living with him would become even more of a trial. His wife and child had died in the first war, but he remained faithful to their memory and he thoroughly disapproved of the physical weakness that drove men to sex with people they didn't know, like, trust or respect. I agreed with him completely, and yet I was... So there was the hypocrite problem. Secondly, I could not make Karl a part of the friendships I had with Heero, Trowa, and Duo. I just couldn't. I tried to envision what Duo would say when I told him involved myself with an Ozzie, a rabid Treize loyalist no less, and the thought was so horrifying that it was immediately discontinued.  
  
Additionally, Karl had shown no interest in openly declaring anything either. I had my reasons for suspecting why he wouldn't want to, but I had no substantiated evidence. If I looked a bit harder, I could probably find it.  
  
I stared blankly at the lists of names in front of me, scratching off a few that made no sense. We had to assume that Benji's death was for a reason, and for many of these men, their deaths would have no reason other than random cruelty. They honestly just weren't that interesting.  
  
I wrote in a few of the names Duo had found, high-ranking officers, a few community leaders, a few rebels, all dead from mysterious accidents, strange illnesses, or suicide. One of them was a homicide in Old Los Angeles. All of it looked pointless.  
  
I glanced up at the clock and gathered my books and papers together, sliding the list of names amongst some sheets of notes. I'd flush it down the toilet later as I did every other list Karl and I compiled in our free time. Random lists of names floating about our cells did not make for good conversation with other inmates or staff members.  
  
Getting books and notes together into as neat a stack as I could manage I headed for the exit, on my way, passing through the closed off carols for quiet study. My teachers had suggested I reserve one to help me focus on my coursework. I informed them that it wasn't lack of focus that was the problem. Rather it was that the reading material bored me to tears, and no amount of isolation would spark my interest in reading books about, for, and by dead white men from a different era. They thankfully dropped the suggestion. Though they also reported me to Rorty and I had to endure a double dose of one-on-one basketball games/counseling sessions for about three months. I still think I got a better deal than those poor saps in their cubicles studying biology or finance and deluding themselves into thinking that someone would hire them some day.  
  
I had almost made it to the exit when I heard it - a muted rhythmic sound from one of the carols on the left. Identifying the sound almost instantly, I was reminded of another reason why I stayed out of the quiet study carols. While they were great for individual privacy, individuals weren't the only ones to make use of them for that purpose. Lucky for those couples who needed the alone time, not too many guards passed through here. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there were little square windows situated about two-thirds of the way up the doors into the cubicles, so that if anyone did happen to pass by while one was so "occupied," he got an eyeful without really intending to.  
  
The unintended eyeful that I'd just gotten was enough to stop me in my tracks. My jaw clenched and the grip I had on my books tightened until my knuckles ached. I blinked a few times and realized that I hadn't actually needed to look too hard for the evidence that Karl wouldn't want to openly be with me. It was right in front of me, as I suspect it had been for much of the time I'd been here.  
  
He was bent over the desk with his uniform bunched down around his knees, t-shirt shoved partway up his back. One of White Fang's less reputable and significantly crazier former members was doing the honors, gripping him by the hips and shoving into him hard enough that the desk was creaking and pulling where it was bolted to the floor. The guy looked to be enjoying himself thoroughly, as did the officer standing against the wall watching. Brandt had always been one of my least favorite guards for his passive-aggressive attitude and his voice, suited for making veiled threats. I now had a new reason to add to the previous, comparatively insubstantial ones. The pace looked painful, and so did the way Karl's hip bones knocked up against the edge of the desk. He gripped the sides, fingers sliding along the smooth wood veneer until his position got too precarious and he readjusted his hold again. His face was flushed and he was sweating, but his eyes were blank, his expression utterly neutral. He didn't appear unwilling, but neither did he appear particularly present. It was as though he didn't need to pay attention to what was happening to his body.  
  
Then White Fang threw his head back and jerked forward a few more times, shouting barbaric, disgusting words at the ceiling. Brandt's breath quickened and still Karl showed nothing. Feeling decidedly ill, I was about to bolt for the exit when Karl suddenly looked up through the window and met my gaze, head-on. His lips pressed together in a tight smile and then he looked away, levering himself up onto his elbows and reaching down to-  
  
Then I did run, making for the exit and my cell and my empty bunk and my prudish, wonderfully functional roommate. I grabbed the door frame and flung myself around the corner - finally out of the library - and ran headlong into Ms. Francesca Prescott, director of RCNP, herself.  
  
Normally, I pride myself on my natural athleticism and all the characteristics that go along with it - speed, endurance, strength... balance and agility. Well, I had plenty of speed and a full head of steam behind it, but all sense of balance abandoned me as my armful of books and papers connected with her chest and the arm I reached out to steady her accidentally massaged the side of her right breast. It was like something out of a bad sitcom, or a scene from one of Benji's comics that he'd kept stashed under his bunk. It wasn't something that I would do.  
  
She appeared to be of the same mind as she stumbled back a step, dark brown eyes bugging out of her head in surprise. Her left arm pinwheeled almost comically a few times to keep her balance. I still had a hold of her right arm, which reminded me that the backs of my fingers were still touching her right breast, which prompted me to let go as soon as I saw her - now completely recovered - leveling a shrewd glare at my hand. I'd managed to drop only half of the books in my arms and so bent down to pick them up, trying to recover from both the shock of slamming into her and the unfortunate spectacle in the library cubicle. Both at once was no easy task.  
  
"I am so sorry," I started. "I didn't see you coming and I wanted to get back to my ce- back to my room before curfew and-" I wasn't listening to the words spilling out of my mouth like tepid water, but was thinking instead of how best to keep Prescott from continuing into the library and bearing witness to what I had just seen a moment before.  
  
It was against the rules for officers to be involved with inmates, more so than it was for inmates to be having sex in library cubicles, but the fact that the right thing to do was to report them didn't even enter my mind. After only two years, 'right and wrong' as well as 'good and bad' had been twisted and warped into 'what will make for less trouble and what will make for more.' Reporting Brandt, disgrace that he was, would only cause more trouble for Karl if Brandt received only a reprimand or even leave without pay. And it went without saying what would happen if White Fang got in trouble. So...  
  
"Are you hurt? Did I-"  
  
She straightened her shoulders and ran a hand through the dark hair that had come free of its pins and now framed her face. "No, of course not," she snapped. "I'm perfectly alright. The question is, what on earth were you doing tearing out of the library like Hell itself was at your heels?"  
  
I offered a small, conciliatory smile. "Escaping from the mounds of homework?" It sounded more like something Duo would say, and judging by the skeptical tilt of one elegant eyebrow, she didn't exactly buy it either.  
  
"It's been my understanding, Wufei, that you don't concern yourself with homework, that even going to class has been more effort than you care to contribute."  
  
Sometimes Francesca Prescott reminded me a bit too much of Lady Une, when she wasn't letting the nice part out. Prescott had darker skin - her family had been either Spanish or Italian; no one was sure - and was significantly shorter, but her presence was the same. Duo would have said "big and scary." I went more with "pushy and mannish." It was a mystery to me how neither Une - with a split personality and a reputation for liking them both quite a lot - nor Prescott - another officer who lived and nearly died for Treize - would both end up in such positions of power, while someone like Karl, arguably no more of a zealot than either of them, ended up behind bars. I didn't think he was that much crazier than they were.  
  
"I- well, I thought I should try to get caught up."  
  
"Hm, I see. And did you make any progress? Judging by the speed at which you exited this hall of learning, I would venture to guess, 'not much.'"  
  
I tried to look appropriately chastened. "Yes, I should get back to my room to read a bit for tomorrow before lights out."  
  
She nodded sharply. "You do that." Then she headed for the entrance to the library.  
  
"M-maybe you could walk with me. We haven't spoken in a long time."  
  
She turned back, that eyebrow arched again. "No, that's true we haven't. Should we have been? You don't see me walking other residents back to their rooms at night. They're all grown, mostly responsible men."  
  
"I thought perhaps we could discuss my future - what I might do after I leave RCNP." And I was rather curious about that, though I wasn't sure I wanted to hear her thoughts on the matter. She and Une had butted heads over my case for weeks before my sentence started. As far as I knew, I was the only inmate who might have a future in Preventers, and maybe the only inmate who had a shot at any sort of interesting future. Not that Onur didn't think trigonometry was interesting. For some reason, he did.  
  
Right on cue, she stiffened. "Your future is not something to be discussed here and now. Or ever, if you continue along the path you're headed."  
  
And, right on cue, I stiffened. "You can't keep people here just because they don't do their homework."  
  
She shrugged. "No, you're right about that. But you will stay here as long as you are a threat to the peace and as long as you're a threat to everything Relena has worked for. I can keep you here for those reasons. And you would do well to remember that."  
  
"Why would I want to join Pr- Why would I want to join an organization that protects the peace if I really wanted to destroy it? Why would you keep any of these men and women from doing what they're really good at, if they could do it in protection of the peace?"  
  
She turned away from the library and headed in the direction of the cell block. I hurried after her, relieved that I'd temporarily diverted a major problem for one of my only friends. We walked shoulder to shoulder, though she kept trying to pull ahead of me - and usually managed to do it, even in heels. "Because," she hissed. "I don't trust that these men and women would do what they are so very good at in service of the peace. Just as I don't really believe that you want to join the Preventers."  
  
I nearly tripped over my own feet, and she looked back at me with a thin smile, enjoying my surprise. "Of course I want to-"  
  
"You don't have the foggiest idea what you want, Wufei. If you hadn't continued to fight after your friends stopped, if you hadn't joined Mariemaia's army and obeyed the orders of that weasel Dekim Barton, you wouldn't be here. You would be a war hero. But you didn't stop. You continued to fight, and you did it for a reason, one that I am aware had nothing to do with Dekim Barton's goals. Joining the Preventers would be a way for you to continue to fight. It would direct your aggression and your admittedly impressive abilities. Your friends Barton and Yuy took that route, and it appears to be working for them, but they are not like you. They are good soldiers who believe in the right things, in the things worth defending, and you..." We'd stopped outside the cell block, and she stepped close to me, lowering her voice when two guards came within earshot. She crossed her arms over her chest and even though she was shorter than me, she commanded just as much attention as someone a foot taller. "Well, you seem to think you're special."  
  
Having recovered from the initial shock of her declaration, I couldn't hold back the ugly sneer that had worked its way up from my chest. "Am I not? Aren't all of us you've got locked up in here? Isn't that the whole point?"  
  
She smirked. "Of course. You're all beautiful, unique snowflakes." I had a feeling this conversation was coming to an end. "Here at RCNP, we work to nurture your unique abilities so that you may reenter society as a productive businessperson or teacher or mechanic. We want you to be the best citizens you can be." She pointed into the cell block. "Now get to work on your reading. I'm tired of seeing your name on my desk each week. And let me know if you would like to have any more of these chats. I thoroughly enjoyed this one." Then she spun on her heel and departed, the sound of her pant legs swishing together fading as she got further away.  
  
I watched her departure and then rubbed the ugly expression from my face with my hand, taking a steadying breath. That had been bracing. Across the way, Busey was giving me the 'what did you do this time?' look. I shook my head in his direction and headed for my cell, glad to find Onur already there, studying as usual.  
  
I didn't look up when Karl passed by a few minutes later.

+

"What about Eben Oulette?"  
  
I lay flat against the bench, squinting up into the spindly olive tree, thinking about dinner and how much I was looking forward to it, no matter the quality of what I ate.  
  
"You mean aside from the fantastic name?"  
  
Karl huffed a laugh. "Yes. Aside from that."  
  
"Um, what's his story again? Ex-OZ Specials, right?"  
  
"Right. That pretty chick you know, what's her name, Noun?"  
  
"Noin. Oh, yeah, I remember this guy. Noin was his superior. But he, unlike her, didn't know the difference between breaking orders for the right reason and breaking orders because you're a fucking loon."  
  
"Still, he made it pretty far up the chain of command, won a few medals, impressed a lot of people..."  
  
"Massacred civilians all for The Cause..."  
  
I could almost hear Karl's shrug. "They do tend to get in the way sometimes. You know that probably better than I."  
  
I closed my eyes against the white humidity in the sky. "Yes I do."  
  
I heard the 'scritch' of the pencil over the rough surface of the table. "He doesn't pull much weight around here, though. Most people are too afraid of him to get friendly, and if he terrorizes anyone, the staff is on it pretty quick."  
  
"They keep him under control," I agreed. "He's not much of a threat anymore."  
  
"Off the list?"  
  
"No..." I ran my fingers along the dusty ground under the bench. "Off the list of victims, yeah, but not the other one. He'd make a good tool, or a good scapegoat if nothing else."  
  
Karl murmured his agreement and the next few moments of silence were filled with vigorous writing.  
  
"Rinko Sakai?"  
  
"From the women's block?"  
  
"I can tell you're making a face, Chang, and yes, Rinko Sakai from the women's block."  
  
I rolled my eyes. "We never see them. They might as well be in another time zone. How would we know who their leaders are?"  
  
"You really need to get over this 'not talking to people' thing. It's pretty cool all the stuff you can find out by approaching others and just asking them."  
  
I sat up and slid my legs back under the table. "Yes, but talking to people is an open invitation for them to say stupid things, which means I have to hear them, and I don't like that. Better to not run the risk and avoid the whole thing all together. You're a good talker. You should do the talking."  
  
Karl gave his lopsided smile and twitched a lock of hair from his eyes. Watching him do this, I felt a distinct twinge in my gut, the kind of twinge I only got when we kissed, or when we found somewhere quiet to be alone. Three times since that first time. And it was only two days ago that I saw him in the library with Eddy Koch (I'd found out his name from Onur) and officer Brandt. I didn't want to think of that night, but I couldn't very well forget it either. And now, forced to confront that image with this twinge in my gut, I had to decide whether I cared that other men fucked Karl. Because it probably wasn't just that one time and it probably wasn't just with Eddy Koch. I had to decide whether or not I cared that the things Karl did to me he let others do to him. If the twinge in my gut was any indication, if seeing him smile put it there, then I probably already had my answer.  
  
"You'll have to tell me about Sakai," I said. "Because I don't know anything about her."  
  
Karl nodded. "Okay. Well, first off, she's a babe." He grinned at me when I snorted in derision. "Second, she's a colony rebel from L1 with ties to the developer of the gundam, Wing Zero."  
  
Now he had my attention. "What do you mean 'ties?'"  
  
"She was one of the brains working under the big brain who first dreamed up the Zero System."  
  
I kept it all off my face, while inside my head, the little bit that I knew about Zero bubbled up from memory in Quatre's voice. Control, vision, prediction, power, possibility, precision, death, over and over again in countless ways, suffocation, fear and madness. Quatre had made it all after witnessing his father's death. He'd built it, mastered it, and then surpassed it. It'd nearly driven Duo out of his mind, and the sound of Heero's breath over the comm links as he fought with it was not a sound I'd soon forget. Many individuals had tried to take advantage of the system and most of them had ended up here, including Dorothy Catalonia.  
  
"Apparently, the lure of money trumped science for science sake, because she tried to sell copies of the program to some splinter group of colony rebels who ended up turning her in."  
  
Karl didn't mention Quatre by name, though his memory sat between us like a barely visible spirit. He rattled off a few other things about this Sakai woman that convinced me she was a shady character, and that Quatre should have known better than to let her work with him. But he'd always been a trusting soul, and even if he had been able to feel out her duplicity, he probably thought she'd been doing it for an important reason. And maybe she had. Reasons for actions weren't always taken into consideration when meting out punishment.  
  
"I don't know, Karl, what do the other women think of her? She wasn't a leader during the war; she was a mercenary scientist."  
  
He shrugged. "Don't know."  
  
I'd grown irritated with this conversation, probably because this was the second time in recent history that Karl had brought up Quatre, forcing me to remember things I'd rather not, and then encouraging me to look for Quatre in him because sometimes they really did look alike. Karl forced me to miss Quatre more than I wanted to, so it seemed only fair that I return like for like and try to make him as uneasy as he made me.  
  
"Well, if you don't know, then why did you bring her up?" I snapped.  
  
Karl's mouth twitched at my tone, and I had the feeling that he'd gotten the exact reaction he'd been looking for. "Just thought she was an interesting case is all."  
  
"Well, how about Eddy Koch? He's an interesting case if ever there was one." Stupid, asinine, bull-headed, immature thing to say. Couldn't take it back, though, no matter how lame I felt the moment I'd said it.  
  
Naturally, Karl didn't even blink. "What about him? He wasn't a leader during the war; he just blew up some people he shouldn't have." He reached for his cigarettes, perhaps the only indication that he was the slightest bit uncomfortable. "Why, do you know something I don't?"  
  
I chewed the left side of my lower lip to keep from making an incredibly rude statement about what exactly I knew. I managed to limit my reply to: "I think he exercises a fair amount of influence around here - pulls facility staff and a few inmates in to a tight inner circle."  
  
Karl lit the cigarette and then watched the edges of the paper turn brown as it started to burn. "Really. I hadn't noticed that. Who has he pulled in? I always got the impression he was big and dumb, and without the common sense god gave a hamster." He took a long drag on the cigarette. "Nice dick, though. That's the word on the street anyway."  
  
The mood having turned decidedly foul, I sneered back at him. "Is that all you require, then?"  
  
"I require lots of things. I'm very needy, and easily bored."  
  
"I hate needy," I hissed. "And I hate weakness."  
  
Karl rolled his eyes, seemingly oblivious to how near my temper was to snapping. "Tell me about it. That's all you used to talk about when you first got here. Justice and honor and weakness. A few nights I had to jerk off, like, three times thinking about you, just to dirty up that self-righteous image you pounded into my head. It always worked." He grinned. "And now I get the real deal without all the blow-hard bullshit you used to carry around with you. Sometimes life is sweet, don't you agree?"  
  
I was off the bench with one knee on the table and a fist in Karl's collar before he even blinked. I pressed him back until he leaned precariously off the bench, the back of his head almost touching the trunk of the olive tree. "You want justice? Maybe I should finally do the right thing and stake my claim on you - make you mine. It'd be the righteous thing to do, protecting you from further harm, keeping morons like Koch away from your ass. Wouldn't you just love that, Karl? Seeing my justice every single day when we fuck in the showers for everyone to see?"  
  
He went very still then, bright blue eyes meeting mine and searching, unwavering, for sincerity. At that moment, neither he nor I knew if the offer was genuine or not. Finally he snorted and looked away. "That wouldn't be justice; that would be suicide."  
  
I let go of his collar and leaned away. Karl sat up in his seat and straightened his shirt. He puffed on his cigarette without removing it from his lips, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth and then inhaling hard. The length of ash at the end started to droop. "Why?" I asked.  
  
The restless tapping started again. I hadn't noticed that it'd been absent for most of this conversation. "Because a lot of my problems are already your problems."  
  
He stood up from the table and put both hands at the small of his back, stretching a little and avoiding my eyes. "Where are you going?"  
  
He looked at an imaginary watch. "It's dinner time, Chang. I heard your stomach growling earlier. You should be excited." He was about to turn away when I rose from the bench and reached across the table to again grab him by the collar of his shirt. His eyes widened and he snatched the cigarette from his mouth a half-second before I kissed him. It was wet and noisy and I got spit on his chin, but eventually he closed his eyes and leaned into it a little. In my peripheral vision I saw several men pause to stare at us. A few of them whistled.  
  
If Karl wanted to think that I'd made a move on him just to protect him, I wouldn't try to persuade him otherwise. Nor would I volunteer any other possible motivations.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \-----------  
> Warnings: AMBIGUITY runs rampant.  
> The G-boys return! - one of them anyway. Sorry for the length of their absence. And thank you to those who don't mind the OCs!

The king of the jungle  
was asleep in his car.  
When your chances fall in your lap like that,  
you gotta recognize them for what they really are.  
Nobody in this house wants to own up to the truth.  
I crawl in shotgun and reach into his mouth  
and grab hold of one long, sharp tooth  
_\- Lion's Teeth M.G._  
  
The sound of Heero's shoulder blades smacking against the wrestling mat was music to my ears, and I aimed a tight-lipped smile down at where my palm was pressed into the ball and socket joint. But of course victory was short-lived as his legs jack-knifed up to his chest and then snapped back out like they were spring-loaded, and he nearly took my head off as he flung himself upright. He swung his left arm in a stiff backhand, forcing me back a step further and then shifted his weight, twisting into a roundhouse kick. I took the kick on my forearms and then grabbed for his leg before he could lower it, aiming an elbow for his kneecap. But he twisted again, kicking off with the foot he still had planted so that I had to let him go or feel all five of his toes dig under my jaw bone. He fell to the ground like a cat, landing silently on all fours and spinning in a tight arc to try to sweep my legs from under me. I jumped and bent my body into kick at his throat, but he somersaulted backwards and regained his feet, taking a few sliding steps back along the mat and returning to his stance.  
  
"How are your studies coming? Have you gotten your teachers off your back?" he asked, voice as flat and expression as stony as ever.  
  
I rolled my shoulder and popped the vertebra in my neck. "At what point would they ever be off my back, Yuy? It's their purpose in life to be on my back. Or at least they get paid to do it." I took a few casual steps toward him and he shuffled back a half step, readying himself.  
  
"Just thought I'd ask."  
  
I feinted right and then dug two quick jabs at his middle. He blocked both and brought his knee up when I got in close. I caught it between crossed forearms and pushed him back.  
  
"I do the assignments that I don't find insulting and it's enough for me to pass the courses."  
  
"That's very big of you."  
  
"Did you know that they call me Chang the Magnanimous?"  
  
Heero's mouth twitched up into a small smile. "I'm sure it's what your teachers enjoy about you most." He came at me again, a series of probing fists and fingers that, no matter how quickly I blocked, found their way through to glance off my ribs and shoulders. I ducked under a whistling kick, and managed to sweep his feet from under him before he recovered his stance. But when I approached to pin him, he twisted around onto his side and grabbed my ankle, jerking me down onto the mat beside him. With a snarl from both of us, the sparring turned into wrestling.  
  
I liked the way Heero moved, and I had ever since I encountered him outside of his gundam. If Duo moved like gravity didn't apply to him the same way it did the rest of us, Heero had found a way to make gravity his strongest defense. With his feet flat on the ground, he could not be moved. When we sparred, he was never off balance because he had the lowest center of gravity I'd ever seen. He kept his knees bent when he shifted his weight and his limbs moved like they were magnetized - centered and controlled and deeply connected to the earth. Even in space, when gravity really didn't apply, Heero always knew which way was down; he could always orient his body to make it the most effective weapon in whatever environment he found himself. And he always landed on his feet.  
  
When I got him on his back, he twisted and slithered about, his spine flexible and reminiscent of a muscular snake, until he could flip himself over. And if he was able to flip himself over, the fight was finished. When grappling with Heero Yuy it was very important to keep him on his back. I fought to get him into a hold, bending my arms through his, struggling to keep his legs pinned under mine. Even though his expression remained mild, I knew he was scowling beneath it. And, oddly enough, still enjoying himself. His muscles twitched and flexed under mine, testing the strength of the hold. He watched me from under heavy lashes and, for those few seconds when I had him pinned, I felt like a foolish kid who'd gotten hold of a dangerous creature's tail.  
  
Heero knew it, and I knew it, and dammit, two years of morning forms and monthly sparring was just not enough to keep me in the kind of shape needed to take on Heero Yuy and be his equal. The first time I'd realized this, shortly after Heero started to visit regularly, about six months after my sentence had begun, I'd been furious. My reflexes were slipping and so was my strength, and I noticed the second Heero tried to go easy on me. I had not yet realized the extent to which Heero could take on all of our guilt and bear it as though it were his own, so I took his restraint as an insult and tried to make sure that he would never do it again. I broke his nose and told him not to come back. He retaliated by reflex, without even hearing me, his body taking the necessary steps to eliminate a threat. If Busey hadn't shouted for him to stop, he probably would have snapped my spine over his knee. After several weeks of correspondence through Trowa and Duo, I convinced him that, not only did I want him to come back to continue to spar with me, but that I needed him to, so that I would have a hope of passing the Preventer entrance exam and so I could continue to scare off anyone here who wanted to mess with me. Of course, I didn't tell him the very last part.  
  
Over a year and a half later, I'd gotten a handle on the fact that, physically, I could not beat Heero Yuy in a fight. He was stronger and faster than me, and I couldn't do anything about the muscle mass that I had lost. But he was far more trusting and that was something I had learned to manipulate very well.  
  
I kept him in that hold for another few seconds, feeling him prepare to move under me. Then his body surged up, starting with his right hip, throwing me to the side. He rolled and twisted his arms out of my grip, one large hand snapping around my wrist before I could get away. But now he was the one holding the tiger's tale as I drove the heel of my other hand into his chest. He immediately let go and leaned away from the strike, absorbing the impact and rolling back with it, on his feet again in one fluid motion.  
  
"How is it going, living in the same building as Katherine?" I asked it in the same tone he'd asked me about my studies. But where he had been only polite-to-slightly-curious, I had a different purpose in mind.  
  
As Trowa had volunteered to tell us when they'd come to visit on the 13th of July, his sister had broken her ankle in a fall and had moved to Rome to be closer to her brother and to get away from the circus for awhile. The last time he'd visited, Duo had informed me that, after only a short time, Trowa had asked her to move in to his apartment with him, since she wasn't very mobile and she didn't have enough money saved up to afford a place on her own until she healed up - even though she had initially insisted otherwise when she'd come to town, claiming that she didn't want to be in her brother's hair, but that she just wanted to be closer to family. Being the maternal sort, Trowa hadn't believed it for a minute and had dragged Heero with him to where she'd been staying in a small hotel and, together, they'd brought all of her belongings back to Trowa's apartment.  
  
Which happened to be in the same building as Heero's. They worked together; they were partners, and more than that, they were in a foreign city with no friends and no one they particularly trusted. I'd spent considerable time railing at them not to leave Brussels - the only place where they could really have a home - for those exact reasons, but they didn't listen. I felt guilty for awhile, being the cause for such a decision, and then I let it go, passing the guilt on to Heero, though of course, I hadn't realized he'd taken it at the time.  
  
Heero's mouth tightened into what might have been a frown. "She likes to cook for us. It's not always good."  
  
"Ah. My sympathies."  
  
He heard the unspoken second half of that sentence concerning the quality of the food that I ate every day and I saw his jaw clench a bit tighter. For someone whose spirit had been impregnable during the wars, he was easy to dig into now. I knew he was an excellent field operative and the most skilled officer Preventers had in terms of the kind of invisible infiltration that ghosted through computer hard drives and along network cables, but to me, and to Duo, he was on one of Trowa's high wires without Trowa's knowhow. This was how I had a chance at beating him - it was the only way I ever could these days.  
  
It had never been in my nature to tolerate what I thought to be weakness, and perhaps I'd been cruel about it in the past - why Sally and Noin considered themselves my friends when I'd been nothing but spiteful and rude to them was beyond me - but I didn't try to hurt people needlessly. I found Heero's floundering disturbing and strange and wrong, but some part of me, the part that recognized the need to dominate in whatever way and by whatever means necessary, the part that this place nurtured, saw him falter and wondered what could come of it, what would happen if I prodded just a little harder.  
  
"How's Trowa taking it? Does he still like having her closer?"  
  
Heero stayed in his stance, waiting for me to come at him, looking cornered even though I hadn't moved since I'd regained my feet. "I believe so. I believe he finds it reassuring, having her where he can look out for her."  
  
I exhaled a sharp laugh. "That sounds like Trowa."  
  
And just like that, something big and fierce and incredibly defensive reared up out of him, making him appear taller and broader, bringing the double image of a fighter with his feet firmly on the ground and a scattered, damaged war casualty into one, focused individual - an individual who had a focus. "What do you mean by that?" His voice was tight and dangerous, and his hands were suddenly clenched into tighter, tensed fists. My limbs flooded with adrenalin, feeling the waves of protective anger rolling off of him.  
  
"I mean that Trowa needs to feel that he's protecting those he cares about. He needs to have them close by so that he can feel useful." I watched the gears turning as Heero tried to determine the intent of my statement and whether or not I was insulting him or Trowa. "Is she getting in the way, invading your space like that? Taking him away from you?" If Duo were here, he would be whistling in amazement and ducking for cover. I invited his advance with a twitch of an eyebrow.  
  
As reliable and as predictable as the laws of motion, Heero reacted on instinct, feeling my words pierce a part of him that I wasn't supposed to see. I stepped quickly backwards as he came at me, my feet sliding across the old mat, the proportions of the room etched in memory so that I knew when my back neared the wall. I blocked the first two punches, feeling the impact in my shoulder joints, and twisted away from a kick that probably would have had me pissing blood. I came up against the wall and slid down, wincing at the sound of knuckles against concrete, but I couldn't get out of his reach quick enough and I felt a hand on my back, fingers slipping on sweat and looking for purchase. We sparred shirtless for a reason. I nearly choked on my surprise when he grabbed hold of the waistband of the loose sleeping pants I wore, and with one powerful shove, sent me sprawling. Heero had never been limited by one particular style of fighting. His only requirement was that it be effective.  
  
I saw his fist aimed for my face and my mind flashed forward to blood on the mat, a trip to the infirmary, a smirking Karl and a disappointed Onur. And one more reason for Heero to feel like the adopted, maladjusted child of a new world order he'd helped to create, but could not understand or function in.  
  
"Or maybe you've both benefited from her arrival. Maybe she's helped you."  
  
The fist froze about a foot from my jaw and I went a little cross-eyed staring at it. I'd lost my physical edge, but had learned other, easier ways to beat Heero Yuy. Using them at first had been a blow to my pride, but the feeling wore off eventually. And now, he was blushing - even flushed from the exertion of a fight, the blush was obvious because his ears turned red. He sat back suddenly on his heels and I chanced a look down at my clothes, hastily jerking the material back up to cover my exposed hip.  
  
"Has she helped you, Heero?" I asked quietly.  
  
He looked down at his lap, and I didn't think he would answer. He didn't have to, and he wasn't the type to provide that kind of information even when it was asked of him. But then he looked back up at me, propped up between the floor and the wall, and he started to look a little guilty, at which point I knew I had him.  
  
"She... she takes up a lot of room in his apartment. It's a small place, and there really isn't room for two, so...Trowa stays with me a lot because I have more space and it's quiet. She gets around with a cane now, so she comes downstairs to see us and, unfortunately to cook, but mostly, she stays upstairs."  
  
So, the answer is, yes, she's helped you tremendously, I finished silently. Heero was still blushing, but I didn't press him any further. I was already formulating a way to reveal this bit of information to Duo in the slowest, most excruciating way possible. He'd been plotting increasingly elaborate ways of extracting the information either from Heero or Trowa as to whether or not they were sleeping together, when I'd suggested that he just ask one of them. Not that I was interested - not that it was any of my business. His reaction had been amusing, to say the least.  
  
"No! Jesus Christ, don't do that! Don't ask them!"  
  
"Duo, what's wrong with asking? They're our friends; you think they'll refuse to answer?"  
  
Duo shook his head. "You know that is a very distinct possibility as well as I do. Trowa would probably withdraw even further from us. I mean, he's a real private guy, and he might, you know, be like a turtle and-" To demonstrate he tucked his head down into his shoulders. "-pull himself into his collar and never speak to us again!"  
  
I laughed and Duo gesticulated wildly. "And Heero, god, if you asked Heero whether he was boning Trowa, I'd have to refer to you henceforth as my friend, Wufei, the smear on the pavement, because that's all that would be left of you!" He was watching me for my reaction, trying to make me laugh again, so I did. By the end of his visit, he'd bet a pack of cloves that he could find out before me and that he could do it without drawing it out of them in a conversation. Because I thought he was being an idiot, and because Karl would like the cloves if I won (and could get me some if I lost), I took the bet.  
  
I had a hunch the information would be easier to get out of Heero, and I'd been right. He was an intensely private person, keeping his emotions close to his chest and the way he felt about the three of us even closer. His steady presence was a clear enough indication - asking him to put those feelings into words didn't seem fair or necessary. But he would do it if he felt it was owed, whereas Trowa would hold out and hide behind his hair as stubbornly as though he were being interrogated by an old enemy instead of one of his few friends.  
  
The sight of Heero sitting back on his heals, fighting with what to say to me, what to reveal about his relationship with Trowa, was enough for me to remember exactly why I'd thought the bet was stupid to begin with. I decided then to give Duo a sufficient amount of grief for proposing it the next time I saw him. I didn't need to see what Heero clearly did not want to show me, and I certainly didn't need to reveal what he already had, to Duo. But of more immediate relevance, I didn't want to be having this sort of conversation at all, scintillating as it might be to someone else with a braid and the need to know everything about everyone.  
  
"Trowa... and I," he started, hunching forward a little, looking like his words were being tugged out of him, like a tube that had been down his throat. "We... I'm not sure if-"  
  
"Yuy," I interrupted. "I don't need to know, and I don't know why you'd want to tell me." I sat up straight and watched sharp, wary blue eyes snap up to mine, unsteady but shrewd.  
  
Heero could be played, but Heero also knew me. He'd been with me right up to the end of both wars, and whether or not he'd understood my motivations for fighting back then, he certainly did now, if a bit belatedly. He lunged at me, a frustrated growl rumbling in his chest when I twisted out his grip. "You can be a real asshole, Chang," he gritted into my ear. We tumbled about on the mat, fighting for the upper hand, our knees and elbows sliding on the smooth, soft surface. "But this isn't news to you," he added.  
  
"No," I grunted, flipping over onto my back and jamming my knee up into his abdomen, shoving him over my head. Of the five of us, I'd always been the snide, prickly jerk, but I maintained it was because everyone else was persistently, frustratingly moronic. I twisted around onto hands and knees, but Heero was already waiting for me. A brief scuffle, during which he got the necessary leverage to get one large foot planted on the mat, resulted in me landing flat on my back for what I decided had to be the last time for the day. There was only so much I could take before it ceased to be productive.  
  
Heero, however, didn't look ready to end the fight. He ran flat calculating eyes from my own down to the waistline of my pants. His eyes caught on a few scars along my chest, old pale lines that suspiciously resembled the straps of a cockpit harness. Piloting in my loose cotton shirt had never been a good idea, but I'd always hated the restrictive flight suits. He didn't let me up, even though it was clear I could do nothing to break the hold. When his gaze dipped down and then back up to mine again, I opened my mouth to ask him exactly what the fuck he thought he was looking at, when he preempted me with a curt question that brought me up short.  
  
"You're being careful, right?"  
  
"...What?"  
  
Shifting his weight to press one arm across my chest, he jerked the drawstring waist down low on my hip, the one he'd exposed before when he'd resorted to pulling on clothes like an eight-year-old.  
  
"Hey! Yuy, what the-"  
  
He pressed on the skin just inside my hipbone and I hissed, craning my neck forward to see what exactly he thought he was doing. Then, I wished for a large-scale natural disaster to strike the complex at that exact moment, sweeping us both away in a flood or sending us plummeting into a crevice opening up to the center of the earth. Either of these would have served to sufficiently distract him from what he was looking at. He moved his thumb to the side to reveal a bruised bite mark, one Karl had put there yesterday when we'd hidden in the dry goods room during our lunch shift. My arms resting on sacks of flour, he'd knelt at my feet and sucked me off in only a little over a minute. There was even time for me to reciprocate, though I still didn't get on my knees for him. I hadn't remembered that he'd bitten me, probably because I was in no position to care at the time.  
  
"Are you being careful?" he asked again. He was so close to me and so willing to openly address what he saw as a risk to my safety that I could do nothing but answer truthfully. And if I had not, I would have been the worst kind of hypocrite, prying into his personal life, but not allowing him into mine. It occurred to me that he was probably very aware of this.  
  
"Yes," I said, meeting his sober gaze.  
  
"Have you told Duo?"  
  
I jerked back by reflex at the very thought. "What? No! Why would I?"  
  
He blinked and his brow dipped in confusion. "Because he's your - because you're-" He searched for the words and didn't find them. "Aren't you?"  
  
"No! We're not. Why would you think we were? Did he say something to you? What did he say?" I reared up against the arm still pressed against my chest and he backed up into a crouch, defensive and tense.  
  
"Nothing! He didn't-"  
  
I had never been so grateful for an interruption in my entire life. Just then, the loudspeakers blared to life, ringing the bell that signaled we were supposed to return to our cells. And shouting over top of that was the sharp male voice of an officer verbally demanding that we do so. It was so loud that the voice distorted a bit and I winced, automatically covering the ear that was closer the loudspeaker. Heero glanced around our small room as though expecting an ambush, and I was already scrambling for my shirt and shoes before the message ended. Even as it did, I heard shouting voices streaming by the closed door, calling out for to anyone who knew what was going on to share with the rest. The guard outside our room threw open the door and glared inside, eying Heero a bit apprehensively.  
  
"You need to leave now, Mr. Yuy, and Wufei, you have to return immediately to your cell. There'll be a room check, so if you're not there-"  
  
"I know, I know. I just have to get my shoes on." The guard ducked out again, and I could hear him trying to create some sort of ordered retreat from the chaos flooding around him. When I'd slid my feet into my flipflops and tugged my t-shirt over my head, I hurried to where Heero was lacing up his boots and grabbed him under both arms, hauling him to his feet. "Let's go, Yuy, you're coming with me."  
  
"I am?" He reached down to snag his shirt before I dragged him toward the door.  
  
"Something serious just went down and if they don't want a Preventer to see it, then I most definitely do. Now, hurry up. And whatever you do, don't let go of me." He glanced down at where I gripped his arm, then up to meet my gaze. I guess he saw what he needed to see, because he nodded once and then we took off into the seething crowd of uniformed inmates. Some of them wore aprons, coming directly from dinner prep. Some smelled like detergent and the moist heat of the laundry room, and some clutched their books to their chests, fending off the crowd with their elbows so as not to drop anything. We blew right past the first guard and between two more at the bottleneck at the end of the hall. Heero pushed his way through the crowd, grabbing my wrist with his free hand so that I released his arm. He pulled his badge out of his pocket, and I wanted to yell at him to put it away, but he wouldn't have heard me. And sure enough, when the men around us caught sight of it, they pushed each other out of the way to clear a path for us.  
  
The yelling got louder as we neared the mess hall, the wide open space the only area in the facility where any large number of people could congregate. They were doing more than congregating. Fights had broken out in small pockets between the rows of tables and benches, and as we stopped briefly to watch, the pockets expanded to encompass others until the mess hall began to look like a battlefield instead of a cafeteria. The sides were instantly clear: Romefellar and White Fang. A few other colony rebels were scattered throughout with old Alliance watching from the sidelines. Staff members pushed their way through the seething crowd, shoving people apart, sending them in the direction of the cell blocks and generally doing very little to diffuse the situation. There wasn't much they could do when they were so heavily outnumbered and the men didn't seem interested in respecting rank without force to back it up.  
  
The energy of the crowd was fearful, I realized. Certainly, the men were angry, but more than that, they were afraid. Heero was on the same wavelength, leaning close to say into my ear, "Why are they scared?"  
  
I shook my head, unable to give him an exact answer. "Someone will take the fall for whatever's just happened. Someone will be blamed." Pulling my arm out of Heero's grip, I tugged on the sleeve of the first person I saw who I thought wouldn't deck me straight out. "Cooper!" I called. "Have you seen Onur?" The big man turned with a shout and swung for my face without so much as a glance at who I was. I ducked easily, but then Heero was behind him, snatching both wrists from the air and pinning them behind the man's back. He was about to step on the back of the guy's knee to get him on the ground, but before he did, he looked to me, and I shook my head, no. The big man relaxed a bit when he saw it was me in front of him, and he didn't dare look behind him to see which one of my friends had immobilized him. They all had reputations here. "Cooper," I tried again. "What's going on? What happened?"  
  
"You haven't heard yet?"  
  
I shook my head sharply. Obviously not.  
  
"Two Romefellar are dead. Found in the supply room by the fucking toilet paper. They're all blaming us for it, fuckers, but they got no proof."  
  
"Retribution for Benji?" I suggested.  
  
He shrugged angrily. "Fuck if I know. We never found out who killed Benji. But those Romefellar fucks are out for blood now. And-"  
  
"Where's Onur?"  
  
Cooper cast his eyes over the crowd and shook his head. "He was here, and he was looking for you. Actually told me to tell you, if I found you, to go back to the room and wait for him and to not do anything stupid."  
  
"Of course he did," I grumbled. Then I reached around Cooper and grabbed Heero's elbow. "Let's go, Yuy." Heero released Cooper's wrists with a terse word of thanks and then caught up to me before we left the mess hall.  
  
"Maybe you should go back to your room. That's what you're supposed to do, and you don't need any trouble from this." His words had a silvery undercurrent of urgency that told me he was now well and truly aware of the situation - seeing possible threats from all angles. He was thinking like a cop.  
  
I shook my head. "No fucking way." I folded his fingers tightly around my wrist again, and tried to convey the seriousness of my request in a way that words simply couldn't. "You are taking me to that crime scene." And you're going to see all the clues that I can not, I added silently. Before he could disagree or refuse, I tugged him forward and we reentered the chaos of the hallways, pushing our way against the current of men heading for their cells.

+

It was a grizzly picture, no doubt about it: two bodies sprawled one on top of the other, and just as Cooper had said, right next to the toilet paper. As we approached, Heero's grip on my wrist tightened, his other hand gripping his badge. My throat closed up with reflexive nerves as he pushed his way through the tight ring of officers around the body. There were still a dozen or so inmates scattered around the supply room, lingering as long as they were allowed on the off-chance of hearing something relevant from the staff. They watched me enter the inner perimeter of the crime scene with wide eyes. And it was more frightening than I wanted to admit. I wanted to see the details; I wanted a better look, more evidence than I'd been able to gather from Benji's death, locked in my cell and helpless as we all had been when it'd happened. I wanted this time to be different, because two might not have been a pattern, but four certainly was. I wanted to stand with Heero and examine the bodies and report back to Karl exactly what I had seen, but all I could think as we squeezed through to stand at the corpses' feet was how much trouble I'd be in for this. I felt the weight of the power difference between myself and the officers pressing down on my back and it was all I could do to keep my head up and actually get a good look at the men sprawled in front of me. I forced myself to breath and tried to block out the feeling of their eyes boring into the back of my head.  
  
Multiple stab wounds appeared to be the cause of death, though it was difficult and probably pointless to guess at which ones were the killing blows for each. The slash in the back of the one looked like it passed between his ribs, maybe high enough to hit the heart. The man underneath had been gutted but I suspected the bloody stain under his left arm was probably the one that did it. The heart was unprotected there. A clean strike in the armpit would always work, if not all that quickly.  
  
Heero knelt down to get a closer look, running his fingers over the edges of the wounds without touching them, clearly wishing for a latex glove. He was scowling, and if it weren't for the hand he still had latched around my wrist, he would have appeared entirely professional, the confidence in the line of his back as it bent forward suited for someone twice his age. If I'd paid more attention at the moment, I would have noticed that I was proud of him.  
  
As interesting as these details were, I had a difficult time looking away from their faces. They were pale in death, but not the sickly pallor of severe blood loss typical of stabbing victims. And I knew them. O'Malley's freckles stood out in stark contrast and his orange hair was even brighter against his skin. He looked as mean as ever, blue eyes glaring at nobody in particular. And flopped on top of him, I instantly recognized Basker's broad back and large hands. They had terrorized Karl and countless others for the last two years; they had wrangled together enough of their goons to come after me on more than one occasion, and now all of that was abruptly over. Part of me felt like crowing at the ceiling, "It's about fucking time!" The rest of my brain was running through Karl's and my lists, mumbling in distress, "It doesn't fit! They were not like Benji or Vasil. They were not like Quatre."  
  
Heero tugged on my wrist and in a bit of a daze, I knelt down beside him, just as I heard Prescott's sharp voice drawing nearer from behind. We had maybe ten seconds. He kept his voice low, barely moving his lips, but I watched his mouth and understood every word. "These men were dead when they received all these wounds."  
  
I looked up at the bodies, at the slashes in their clothes and the blood on the floor. "There isn't enough of it," I replied. And it was true. The wound under O'Malley's arm hadn't spilled much blood onto the floor, and the stain between Basker's ribs was relatively small. Their hearts had already stopped beating by the time the wounds were inflicted.  
  
He grunted an affirmative. "You should leave now. I will stay as long as I can and then contact you later."  
  
He let go of my wrist, not taking his eyes off the bodies. "You'd better," I muttered. I turned to bolt and saw Prescott's heels clicking towards us, then reached back and gave Heero's shoulder a squeeze. "Thank you." He nodded as I shoved my way back out between the ring of officers, unable to stop myself from making guilty eye contact with Prescott as she approached. Her dark eyes blazed into mine and I looked away and ran before she could say anything.


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \-----------  
> Notes: Takes place immediately after chapter 8. The second part takes place a few days later.

It made me remember the sunflower  
that popped-up outside my window one morning in Norwalk.  
It was bright yellow and it was real inviting  
and I almost forgot that it was an intruder.  
And I saw you against the soda machine.  
I saw you leaning there.  
_\- "Chino Love Long 1979" m.g._  
  
Onur's shoulder bumped up against mine as I neared the cell block. Almost all of the men had returned to their rooms by that point, and I knew the doors would be locking in another minute or so, but I had to see Karl. Tapping through cinder blocks would not suffice tonight. The adrenalin still slamming through my blood stream would not allow it.  
  
"Is Karl back yet?" I asked.  
  
Onur's gaze slid to mine and then away just as quickly. "I don't know," he answered. "I didn't stop by the room before I went looking for you. I figured you'd be sticking your nose where it didn't belong and, what to do you know, there you were, inside the caution tape, no less."  
  
I itched to get back to the room, to tell Karl what I'd seen. "There was no caution tape."  
  
"I was speaking figuratively," he growled, eyes sweeping over the cell block with a protective glint. "You were with your incredibly dangerous friend, openly disobeying the orders blaring over every speaker. You were-"  
  
"I was trying to find out who's having us killed off," I said between clenched teeth, just loud enough so he heard me over the continuing buzz of men talking.  
  
He shook his head and rumbled, "I was very afraid you were going to say that."  
  
I looked up at him. "Yeah? Have you been thinking the same thing, Onur?"  
  
His dark eyes narrowed. "Of course not. Your paranoia is staggering and, thankfully, not contagious. But I know you, Chang. I know what being around your friends does to you, what you're like when they're here."  
  
I snorted in disgust at the sheer audacity and inaccuracy of a statement like that. "You know nothing of my friends and you know nothing about what I'm really like," I spat. "You-"  
  
"I think that I do," he snapped back, voice heavy and thicker with subtext. I stopped and turned narrowed eyes on him. He didn't look angry; he looked frustrated and a little resigned. "I'm not threatening you, and I'm not scolding you; I am warning you to be careful. You think that everyone avoids you because you've built a reputation for yourself, and that is surely true to some extent. But you're not as much of a mystery as you think. Maxwell's face was all over the news when he was captured during the first war. Barton and Yuy are the same kind of person. Winner was-" I stiffened in anticipation. "Winner completed the set. He made you a whole. I know they're your good friends, no matter what I might think of them personally. They wouldn't want to see you hurt, wouldn't want you putting yourself in the position where you could be hurt."  
  
I could feel the rest of the lecture about to drop, so I preempted it. "That's a funny thing for you to say, an L4 White Fang volunteer. Because your gang had so much more chance of success than mine."  
  
He flinched but then shrugged. "I had no family left when I made that decision. And I'm still not sure it was the right one. It has marked me for a lifetime. The choices you make here matter as much as the ones you made before, though it may not seem like it."  
  
I left him standing there outside our cell and entered Karl's doorway, pausing to call over my shoulder, "Lock down is in a minute. I probably won't make it. This is a choice I'm comfortable with."  
  
His expression tightened and he looked away. "You are-"  
  
"Not listening," I said with a finality that he could not ignore. His jaw clenched and he disappeared into our room without another word, shoulders hunched around a disappointment in me that he could never seem to let go. I turned to see Karl regarding me from his bunk, one of his accounting books propped up in his lap, one pale eyebrow raised in question.  
  
"You could do a lot worse than listen to Onur," he said. You could listen to me. That would certainly be worse."  
  
In the few weeks since I'd made my intentions toward Karl known, he'd often pointed out that it wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made, nor the safest. I argued differently, and even if I eventually got him to see it my way by the end of the conversation, he still sometimes looked at me with an expression of deeper knowledge and sadness that told me he thought I'd made a mistake throwing my lot in with him, like he thought that he was ruining something for me, something important. Onur appeared to agree whole-heartedly.  
  
And I was sick to death of feeling the judgment of others for my choices. They may have been shitty decisions, but they were mine to make and they were my consequences to deal with. And I didn't make them recklessly, no matter what anyone thought.  
  
I strode the rest of the way into his room and stopped at his bunk, reaching up to grab his ankle and tug his legs over the side of mattress. He smiled at me and sat up, closing his book and spreading his knees so that his feet swung on either side of me. I slid my hand up from his ankle to his calf and then to his kneecap, a possessive touch, the kind I was getting used to making more often so that others could see who he belonged with. I looked up at him and his smile widened.  
  
"I don't listen to you either," I said.  
  
"Sometimes you do."  
  
I tugged hard on his pant leg and he slid down from the bunk to stand directly in front of me. His eyes were bright with the knowledge of the chaos all around us. Basker and O'Malley's deaths were not weighing heavy on his mind. I could see that he was elated. He never looked this excited just to have me in his room. The frenetic energy of all the inmates seemed concentrated in his wiry body. It vibrated out of him in waves that smelled of sweat and relief.  
  
"You're glad they're dead," I said, sliding one foot forward between his, angling our hips a bit closer together.  
  
"I'm not sorry," he replied, resting his head against the bunk, back bent, inviting me to lean forward over him.  
  
The loudspeakers finally fell silent then, after what felt like hours of blaring warnings and reminders, and the rush of quiet that followed was startling, despite the continued low buzz of inmates' voices. It lasted for a few seconds, during which I watched the door where it stood open, counting down in my head, looking away when the bell sounded and it slid shut and locked. I turned back to Karl. "Looks like I'm stuck here for a bit."  
  
"You better hope it's not Brandt who comes to get you out of here." Karl said the name as though it had a foul taste to it. He never spoke of the other inmates with whom he'd involved himself with such disdain. He didn't really speak of them at all, which was fine by me; I didn't want to know about them. He reserved all his disdain for Brandt. Whatever the reasons for our relationship, whatever form it took between the two of us and in front of everyone else, I knew Karl did not miss having Brandt observe from the corner of a library cubicle.  
  
"He's a worm, and he has no power over you anymore."  
  
"Doesn't mean he won't find ways to make your life miserable."  
  
I rested my hand on the small of his back and pressed lightly against him. "This was the right thing to do, and I don't regret it."  
  
Karl pushed off the bunk and brought his mouth close to my ear. "You have a way of always sounding certain about things even when you're not."  
  
I turned my nose into his jaw and rubbed it against light brown stubble. We were safer together, openly in a relationship, than we were alone, and that was a good enough reason for both of us, but these intimate touches soothed a lonely ache that I'd been living with, and that feeling was probably more of a factor in my motivation for being with Karl than I wanted to think about. "Fools enough people," I muttered against his skin.  
  
"Here's one to throw you off then," he whispered. "Why haven't you fucked me yet?" He bit my earlobe and then chuckled when he felt me shiver. "You made your claim, made yourself the only person allowed near my ass, and all you do is jerk me off after I suck your cock. Not the smartest move you've ever made, is it, Chang, taking me off the market and then not taking advantage of what you got." He pushed his hips into mine and of their own accord, mine rolled back into his. "Afraid you'll catch something from me?"  
  
I shoved some distance between us and pushed his shoulders back against his bunk. I took a breath. "Yeah, pretty much." His hair had flopped into his face and he twitched it aside.  
  
"I won't be so easily insulted," he murmured. "I've seen you looking at the condoms I keep by the sink. When are you going to fuck me?"  
  
The fact that I was stronger than him, that I could easily dominate him physically, had not meant that I automatically wanted to be the dominant one in the relationship. This, however, was what was expected. I avoided talking about it when I could.  
  
A nudge of his thigh against the inside of mine, even from the greater distance between us made my throat close up on whatever I was about to say. I swallowed and took another breath. "There are other things we should be discussing right now," I said, trying for authoritative.  
  
"Like what?" he asked, as though there really was nothing at all to talk about besides why we weren't currently fucking.  
  
"How about that neither Basker nor O'Malley's deaths fit with the pattern of Benji, Vasil, and Quatre?"  
  
Karl rolled his eyes, and shrugged his shoulders. "Sure they do. They were both leaders, just not of the good kind. As I recall, we made a list for them. O'Malley was even on it."  
  
I shook my head and felt it clear a bit, distancing myself from the sensations below the waistline of my uniform. "But they were more thugs than real leaders. They drew people to them out of fear; they could never bring anyone with brains. Once their sentences were up, they would have been out for a grand total of three days before assaulting someone and ending up in real prison. The state punishes people like them with incarceration; it doesn't assassinate them under the guise of a knifing in the storeroom."  
  
Karl gave me his lopsided smirk and shrugged again. "Very good. So, they don't fit our previous pattern. Vasil and Benji and Quatre could have rallied hundreds or maybe thousands around them with the right provocation and the right words. These two clearly could not. So where do they fit?"  
  
"They don't fit," I snapped. "Not unless we're widening the net to anyone who's dangerous, which would include basically everyone in this fucking place, excluding, of course, my roommate."  
  
Karl appeared to turn this over in his head. "Hmm," he nearly purred, jerking me forward so that I pressed against him again. "I'm not feeling particularly safe for the new regime right now; are you?"  
  
I put my hands on either side of his head, gripping the metal frame of the bed. He liked it when I did this; he liked to feel boxed in, though I didn't think it was because he actually liked to feel trapped. I thought it was because he liked watching others feel as though they were dominating him. It made him feel in control when he might otherwise not have been. Because I didn't particularly feel like I was in charge, this posed a challenge to the dynamic he was used to.  
  
"Try and be serious, Karl."  
  
"I am being serious."  
  
"Then are you afraid you're next? Basker and O'Malley didn't start all those fights - you started a few with them. Are you scared now?"  
  
"I don't know." He paused. "I don't think so. What do you think?" He looked up at me through his hair, and I gave a sharp shrug, forming my answer carefully. We'd never considered adding our own names to the list because in no capacity whatsoever could we count ourselves as leaders here. During the first war, Karl had worked alone or with a small team of elite specialists, and I kept basically quiet about anything before my role in the second war. And anyway, I was more concerned for Duo's safety than my own. At this point, he was more of a wild card and a potential leader than I. The point was, while neither of us were "safe" per se, we wouldn't have fit the pattern. I couldn't compare myself to Quatre in this way; though Duo and perhaps Heero, if he spoke up more often, could. "Well," I finally ventured. "If we're talking both influence and power, you clearly have no influence here. That's certain." I watched for his reaction, but he only smiled. "But power? Sometimes I think you're three-quarters of the way through a plot to bring this place to its knees." His smile widened to a grin.  
  
"Burning blades of grass with matches is just the beginning. Wait and see," he said. Standing within the relative shelter of my arms, his pale eyes seemed to glow a bit in the dim light. His body felt sharp and dangerous pressed up against mine. "Do you want to know what I think of you, Chang - whether I think you could be next?"  
  
I shook my head. "Not really."  
  
Images from the crime scene flickered behind my eyes. The bodies became any number of people I knew, or had known in the wars. They became Karl and Quatre, then Heero and Trowa, then Duo and I. I looked down on them with the critical, practiced eye of a Preventer. I felt Heero's grip on my wrist and the urgent need to understand why this was happening to us. I didn't want to know exactly why Karl thought I could be one of those bodies, because, whatever he said would probably be close to the truth.  
  
I tried to be taller, tried to make it so that when I said "not really" he listened and didn't say what he intended to say, but it was just posturing. I knew how to manipulate a giant robot, and to a lesser extent, someone who functioned similarly, someone like Heero, but Karl would always be beyond me. But I could hurt him if I really wanted to.  
  
I gripped his arms, digging my fingers into his biceps, and shoved him sideways along the bunk until we reached its edge. He stumbled along with me, trying to keep his feet under him, until the support of the bed frame at his back was gone, and then he tripped backwards, fetching up against the cinder-block wall with a sharp grunt. "Say it," I hissed. "Go ahead."  
  
He reached up to rub the back of his head and the pads of his fingers came away smeared with a bit of blood. He glared a challenge at me, daring me to listen. "You know what I think? I think you're more dangerous than most the rest of the men and women here put together. But only under certain circumstances. I think you're dangerous when your friends are here, for one, because they make you a whole person, instead of a cranky, belligerent, and insecure literature geek. But more than just making you better, they make you remember who you really are. And when you remember that, you are doubly, triply dangerous because then you remember what you stood for, what you still stand for."  
  
Onur was right - I was a fool to think that my past was a mystery before the second war. I should have known that Karl would have figured out, probably the moment I got here, exactly who I was and what I stood for. I grabbed him by the shaggy hair at the back of his neck and tilted his head back, a growl rumbling up from my chest. But he kept his eyes locked with mine and didn't stop. "Do you want me to tell you what that is?" he whispered. I saw his Adam's apple bob up and down as he swallowed.  
  
"Tell me."  
  
His arms came up slowly, until they rested on mine, sliding along my forearms. Then one was around my throat, long fingers wrapping almost the whole way to the back of my neck. I had my thumb pressed against his carotid in the same second, but my heart still hammered against my ribs in surprise. I would have thought I'd be used to this sort of thing from him by now.  
  
"Chang," he started, and I could feel the vibrations of his vocal chords against my palm, "Here, in this place, when you remember who you are, you are chaos and rebellion and violence." He said this with a slight sneer.  
  
"Sounds about right, coming from a Treize loyalist," I sneered in reply. His fingers tightened around my throat and I pressed my thumb harder against the artery.  
  
"And hope and maybe freedom," he finished.  
  
I dropped my hand and tried to step away from him, but he grabbed the collar of my t-shirt and pulled me into a hard kiss. When he broke it, he kept his lips against mine. "You were the only who could have killed him," he whispered, breath entering my mouth and feeling like it might be poison.  
  
"I was the right person to kill him, or you figured out that I was the only one who could have done it?" For some reason, it seemed terribly important that I make the distinction. And I didn't need to ask him who he was talking about.  
  
"Both, of course." His tongue trailed along my upper lip, tasting the sweat that had gathered there. "Are you going to fuck me now? I know what you are - I could tell everyone here what you did, that you are more of a terrorist than even the most depraved zealot from White Fang or OZ. You killed my leader. You've killed thousands. "  
  
"So have you," I whispered.  
  
"Yes, but you actually pulled the trigger. You'd be dead by lunchtime tomorrow if they knew exactly who you were, who you are."  
  
"What makes you think they don't know already?" Karl looked like he had an answer to that, but I cut him off, not really wanting to hear it. "And you want me to have sex with you so that you won't broadcast my history to the entire facility?"  
  
He leaned back to look me in the eye. "No, I want to fuck because I like you."  
  
I blinked and realized that it was impossible to know whether that was sarcasm or sincerity.  
  
"Are you a bad person, Karl?"  
  
Now it was his turn to blink at me. "Do you really care?"  
  
After two years of semi-friendship and nearly a month of something else that might have been deeper or might have just been unforgivable weakness, I didn't know why I thought expressly asking the question would lead to an answer.  
  
"Of course I care."  
  
"Why?"  
  
His expression was conflicted as he regarded me from such a short distance. The mask of self-assurance, of confidence in his own mental superiority slid and flickered across his features, but the nervous movement of his eyes said that he was genuinely curious.  
  
"Because I don't have sex with bad people." He searched my face and I hoped that it was because he couldn't tell whether that was sarcasm or sincerity.  
  
He shifted against the wall, rubbed at a scab on his chin, tapped the middle finger of his left hand against his thigh a few times. Then he twitched a shrug. "I don't think I'm a bad person. But it's hard to know sometimes." I thought he believed that, that he meant it. He smiled. "So, this is a personal code of yours - no sex with morally ambiguous characters?"  
  
My mouth pressed into a thin, answering smile. "Moral ambiguity I can handle. I draw the line at utter corruption and moral depravity." Line drawing had never been difficult for me. There was justice and there was injustice. It seemed that, after two years, the lines were either getting wider and blurrier or I had completely lost the ability to draw them.  
  
"Oh, we should be okay, then." He cocked his head, as though reconsidering. "I think."  
  
The small bit of space between the bunk, the adjoining wall and the sink behind me was the only bit of privacy we were going to get, locked as we were in a cell. So, we kept our clothes on and stayed standing just in case, and hoped that room check wasn't for at least another ten minutes. We hoped that the dead bodies and the preventer stubbornly refusing to leave without recording every detail of the crime scene in his photographic memory, were enough to distract the staff from what we were doing.  
  
He had condoms, and not surprisingly, cheap lubricant, so we did it right, and I didn't think it hurt him, though the only real indication that he might have been enjoying himself was the strength with which he bit down on the knuckles I'd shoved in his mouth to keep him quiet. I watched his face the whole time and forced his eyes up to mine whenever he tried to look away, wondering if this time, if the fact that it was me and not someone like Eddy Koch, would be enough to keep him focused and present, if maybe he'd look like he was participating. But his eyes were blank like always. His body moved with mine, and his wiry arms strained to hold himself up, one pressed against the wall, the other gripping the bed frame. He was clearly exerting himself; his skin was flushed and he'd begun to sweat, but the eyes that watched me stayed flat and kept me at a distance. I gripped his ribs through his t-shirt and increased our pace, and the sound of his shirt and the back of his head rubbing up and down against the cinder blocks for some reason was one of the more erotic sounds I'd ever heard. His legs tightened around me and it grew difficult to breath. I couldn't tell whether he was close to finishing or not, but I winced when his teeth finally broke the skin of my knuckles.  
  
"Karl," I managed.  
  
He pushed my fingers out of my his mouth with his tongue. "You should finish," he said, breath hitching slightly.  
  
"So should you," I bit back.  
  
He flashed his crooked grin. "I will."  
  
With the threat of an immanent room check hanging over our heads, he finally met my gaze for real, appearing to fully be present for what we were doing. He watched me watching him and then carefully removed his fist from where it had been pressed against the wall, supporting his weight. I took a half-step forward and pressed him harder into the cinder blocks, straining to hold him and keep up our rhythm. He reached between our bodies to touch himself and that was all it took for the both of us.

+

He was asleep in seconds, barely taking the time to retie the sleeves of his uniform around his waist and kick off his shoes before passing out in his bunk. I rested beside him, watching the door and waiting for my forced removal from his room. I hoped they'd be discreet, as it was not often, usually only after I got him off, that Karl fell well and truly asleep.  
  
I waited and thought about how I wasn't breathing a word of this to Duo the next time he visited, no matter what Heero had said... or implied. Or whatever it was he'd done. We would limit our conversation strictly to the new dead people we had to add to our list. Dead people were far more interesting than my personal life anyway, and far more important.  
  
My eyes had started to droop when, finally, the room check came around, a pair of harried guards - thankfully neither of them Officer Paul Brandt - spotting me absent from my room and in Karl's bed. The barred door slid open and they both stepped inside, not waiting for me to get down on my own. I barely managed to slide off the bunk and grab up my shoes before one took me by the elbow and the other gave me a good shove between my shoulder blades. This sort of thing happened fairly regularly - we were hardened war criminals after all. We couldn't be expected to follow the rules all the time. I decided that was what I'd tell Onur, if he asked what I'd been thinking when I violated curfew. Still, a small jolt of anticipation of punishment slid up my spine as they marched me next door and inside my room.  
  
"Extra laundry duty this week," one of them grunted as they left, nodding to Onur before the door slid shut behind them.  
  
"Lovely," I muttered, carrying my shoes over to my bunk and dropping them underneath. Neither Onur nor I spoke up for the rest of the day, even when dinner was brought to our cells and I handed him his plate of food. I spent the evening studying in my bunk, spine pressed against the cool cement, conscious that I was lying nearly back to back with Karl.

+

When I worked in the laundry, I unfolded Duo's bandanna from a strip of cloth to a large triangle and tucked all of my hair up into it. If the yard was like a blast furnace in the summer, then the laundry was a swamp that smelled of static guard instead of mud and had giant stacks of towels instead of dead trees. The washing machines were large open vats of detergent and scalding water that required constant attention so that the towels and uniforms didn't get wound around the agitator in the middle, keeping the rest of the wash from getting clean. When the water drained, leaning over the edge of the machine to scoop out the laundry required enough balance not to fall in and enough strength to lift heavy mounds of material from the wash to the cart with the long paddle used for stirring the wash when it was running.  
  
And I got to do it every day this week, which meant that I didn't get free time for visitors, which meant that I couldn't talk to Heero about what he'd been able to see, or Duo about what this meant for our so-called investigation. There was only Karl, and he was still floating above the ground with the knowledge that his longest and cruelest tormentors were finally gone. He wasn't yet interested in talking to me about the case - namely that whoever'd done it had tried to make it look like Benji's death, but had really been caused by something else, something that Heero had hopefully been able to see before Prescott had him escorted from the premises. Or locked up. Or shot.  
  
I stirred the clothes in the wash and admitted that my paranoia was perhaps getting a little ahead of itself. Even though the preventers didn't have power here as law enforcement officials, they were still civilians, and Heero would not have been harmed for wandering in a place he shouldn't have been. Surely not.  
  
Still, a visit would have been nice, or a phone call from Trowa, or something. But, no, I was stuck in the swampland from Hell, washing towels. My friends could be showing up to see me right now, during my regular free time and they'd be turned away with no other explanation than "He's not available today." And then they would know that I was being punished for something I'd done and Heero would assume that it was his fault and feel guilty about it without telling any of the others or seeking confirmation from me. He'd think it was his fault when really it was that I'd stuck around past lock down in my friend's room so I could get laid. It was quite odd, in fact that, three days after Basker and O'Malley's deaths, I had heard nothing from Prescott or anyone else about my being at the crime with Heero. Not a word about the consequences and, somewhat less surprising, not a word about the crime itself. The past three mornings I'd awoken expecting a summons to her office and gotten nothing but the cold shoulder from Onur and a few hours of laundry duty to look forward to.  
  
I wouldn't, of course, do much to clear up the misunderstanding with Heero, except maybe to tell him that it wasn't his fault without revealing the real reason why. Maybe I'd lost track of time in the library while studying, if he pushed for an answer, which he wouldn't, because he didn't ever. I hefted clothes from the washer into the cart and shook my head at that particularly pathetic fib. I'd only just informed Heero that I devoted nothing more than the bare minimum to my studies. Maybe I'd tell him that I'd been with Karl, relating to him what I'd witnessed from the scene of the murders, and that would basically be the truth. I wouldn't have to fill in any of the details because Heero never asked for-  
  
"Psst!"  
  
My back went rigid bending over the washing machine as I heard and then very suddenly felt the presence of another person somewhere close behind me. My fingers flexed on the grip of the paddle and readied for a fight. No one snuck up on me in the laundry unless they wanted a fight. It was the best place for it, with the most places to hide and the dull roar of the machines drowning out the sound of footsteps and breath.  
  
My jaw clenched and I spun around, keeping my hand firmly on the paddle behind my back, ready to swing if it looked like-  
  
"Duo!" He grinned at me. "What the fuck are you doing here?" I tempered my initial shout to an urgent hiss, casting my eyes over the laundry room at the few other men bent over the washers or amongst the mounds of towels, folding and stacking. With the constant whir and hum of the machines, none of them appeared to have noticed his presence. I looked back to Duo where he stood at the base of the washer, and he was still smiling cheekily, eyes glittering under the brim of his cap.  
  
"They wouldn't let me see you, so I came to find you myself. I figured you'd either be in the kitchen or the laundry." He called this up to me where I still stood, flabbergasted, on the metal platform at the top of the washer. As his voice reached my ear, it clicked that he was shouting to be heard over the machines.  
  
"Would you shut up? Someone will hear you!"  
  
He rolled his eyes. "Would you come down here, so I can stop yelling?"  
  
"Gah. Yes, just be quiet." Dispensing with the formality of steps, I slid under the railing and jumped over the side of the platform, dropping the six or seven feet to the floor and landing right in front of him, forcing him a step back.  
  
"Jeez, Wu!" Then he squawked a curse when I grabbed his arm and dragged him between two mounds of unfolded towels and uniforms. He stumbled to a stop when I let him go and took a moment to straighten his overalls and cap. I took that moment to stare at him and wonder how the hell he'd made it here without being spotted. He didn't appear as though he'd had a tough time of it. His cheeks were flushed with the moist heat and his bangs stuck to his forehead under his cap, but he wasn't too tense. He'd probably enjoyed himself, finding his way here.  
  
He'd clearly come straight from work, the loose denim overalls dark with grease at the knees and hips - the latter most likely from where he'd wiped his hands. The dark blue shirt he wore probably used to be a t-shirt, but the sleeves and neckline had been cut out, so that I could see a bit below the notch of his collarbone; and his shoulders were exposed, his skin darkened to a freckly light brown. I could see the shirt clinging to his chest underneath the bib of his overalls. He looked healthy and excited and strong. He looked really good.  
  
"I take it you weren't seen getting in?" I said, keeping my voice low.  
  
He shook his head. "Nah. You definitely got good security around here, buddy. But nobody stops Duo Maxwell from getting into some place he wants to be." He crossed his arms over his chest and sniffed. "It's fruitless."  
  
I glared at him. "You're insane."  
  
He shrugged. "Yeah, well."  
  
"And you could get us both into big trouble. I don't need to tell you this."  
  
He shifted his hand to his hips, posture indignant. "No you don't need to tell me that. You should start by telling me what the fuck happened that Heero got bitched out by Une on Monday for coming here and seeing you, why Ms. Francesca Prescott called Une and bitched her out for letting Heero come here and snoop around, why Heero called me up two days ago to tell me that two Romefellar flunkies were strangled to death in the store room, and finally - and most importantly - why, when he tried to get in touch with you afterward to tell you that the cause of death was strangulation and not loss of blood, he couldn't get through."  
  
My throat had gone dry at the very beginning of his list, and now I felt like, not only had all the moisture left my mouth, but every drop of blood had also drained from my face. I scrambled for something to say. "He couldn't get through because I had extra laundry duty this week," I managed lamely.  
  
Duo snorted. "Yeah, I know that now, but Heero was assuming the worst, as he usually does, and thinking that it was something he'd done by dragging you into the middle of it. He told me the two of you went together to get a look at the bodies and that Prescott was super pissed when she found you both were there. He thinks he screwed things up for you, and that you're-"  
  
"He actually told you all that?" I asked, momentarily distracted. Duo snorted.  
  
"Course not - about half of it. I inferred the rest, as per usual."  
  
I nodded, debating what to tell and what to keep quiet. "He didn't screw anything up for me," I finally assured him. "I was the one who dragged him into the middle of it. And the extra laundry duty isn't because of that. For some reason, there haven't been any repercussions from that day. My extra laundry shifts were for something else." I figured setting Heero's mind at ease was much more important than concealing the real reason for my unavailability this week.  
  
"What's it for, then? What'd you do?" He searched my face with wide, concerned eyes. He only wanted an answer. He only wanted to know why the last few days had been so chaotic for his good friend and, presumably, for me.  
  
"I was out past curfew with Karl. That's all. We were talking about Basker and O'Malley - the Romefellar flunkies who were strangled in the supply room," I added, because he wouldn't know their names. The word 'strangulation' was giving me some trouble. How had that not been obvious when Heero and I were examining the bodies? Why didn't I see marks? When had Heero? "We both knew them. They were bullies and they'd given us trouble in the past - lots of trouble in Karl's case. We had a lot to talk about."  
  
He gave me an unsettlingly shrewd look. "...Ah." He didn't trust Karl. They'd barely spoken a complete sentence to each other since Duo had begun looking into our case.  
  
It wasn't a lie, what I'd told him. It wasn't.  
  
"Any leads? What did he think?"  
  
"Uh, well, to be honest, he was too excited by the fact that they were dead and couldn't beat the shit out of him anymore to take the conversation too seriously." Still not lying.  
  
He sniffed and then wiped his nose with a grubby hand, leaving a smudge of oil grease on his upper lip, like the shadow of a mustache. "Guess I can't blame the guy. I saw a few of those bruises. These guys musta been real assholes, huh?"  
  
I nodded, relieved. "They were two of the worst. So," I started, looking to change the topic, "is Heero okay? He didn't, you know, really get into any trouble, did he?"  
  
Duo gave a sharp shrug and abruptly dropped down to sit on the floor, propping his elbows up on his knees. "He'll be fine once I tell him you were unreachable because you missed curfew, not because of something he did. But Une was real serious about him not being allowed to take up the case, and he's really not happy about that. His voice was even tighter than usual when we talked."  
  
I sat down across from him. "And what did you tell him?"  
  
He shook his head. "What do you mean?"  
  
"For example, did you mention what you're doing for Karl and me - using fancy software to uncover private information about war leaders who have died or were killed for potentially political reasons?"  
  
He gave a flat humorless laugh. "Oh, that. Yeah, you think that might be of interest to a Preventer?"  
  
"It would. And I know, outside of Preventers, Heero would want to know, would, I'm sure want to help in any way he could, but-"  
  
"He'd lose his job in a second if he did, or if anyone found out he was looking into it."  
  
"We couldn't ask that of him, or Trowa," I agreed. After what had happened, it was clear I'd made the right choice going to Duo for help.  
  
"Not that I've been much of a help so far," he muttered, following my train of thought, "in place of an entire organization with access to resources I have to spend hours trying to hack into. I've got some shit to show you, but I can't bring it with me, and handing you a list of names isn't doing shit to keep you safe." He looked down at his knees, clearly frustrated with himself and the bind we were in.  
  
"Preventers hands are tied; yours are not, and you don't have a boss to whom you feel obligated to report what you find," I replied. When this didn't appear to help his mood, I added, "And I trust you more than, I think, anyone." Now he looked up. I felt the need to try and wipe away the smear of dirt on his upper lip and clenched my fists in my lap. More than anyone in the world, you are my truest, most loyal friend, I finished silently.  
  
Duo shook his head and grinned. "Sometimes, Chang, you outdo yourself."  
  
Thankfully my face was already flushed from the heat of the laundry, and I was able to grumble, "Keep your expectations low, and anything other than spiteful rudeness will be a pleasant surprise." He laughed, and the mood was becoming dangerously sentimental, so I cleared my throat and returned to the more pressing matter of what Heero had been able to gather before he'd been kicked out of the storeroom. "Erm, Duo, did he say anything else to you when he called, anything at all?"  
  
His grin shrank and then disappeared, and he nodded. "Yeah, he said a bunch of discouraging shit that you probably already know. He said that your keepers aren't releasing the bodies for an official autopsy, and that they will be the ones to alert the victims' families. Heero said they were taking care of all it, and handling the investigation themselves like they did with Benjamin Bennett."  
  
"That sounds about right. RCNP is state run, but it's got its own people to manage every facet of something like this. Karl and I are realizing just how little oversight there is here." At Duo's look of incipient panic, I added, "But, I don't think it's so Prescott can make up arbitrary rules. I think it's so that we remain outside political influence. There are plenty of people who disagree with the whole idea of this place, and so Relena Peacecraft and the others who designed it wanted it to be safe from those who would try to change the way it was run, to turn it into something else."  
  
Duo frowned. "Sure, but if there's no publicized code, and no way of getting rid of anybody who might be abusing their power, then Prescott's got full discretion and no real rules to break."  
  
"Pretty much, though she probably doesn't see it that way. And neither would Relena."  
  
"This is scaring the shit out of me; you realize that, right?"  
  
I looked up. "Duo..." It came across as patronizing. "Don't be ridiculous. I'm fine. I'm not a target like they were, like Benji was."  
  
He ignored my slightly condescending tone. "What about Quatre?"  
  
I looked away, humbled. "And I am certainly not like Quatre."  
  
"Bullshit, you're not,"he snapped, and I flinched. We started to argue, the surest way to express and mask helplessness.  
  
"How could you possibly compare me to him?" I snapped back. "There are maybe a handful of people who will tolerate me sitting near them at lunch much less look to me as a friend, or even less realistically, as a leader."  
  
Duo didn't appear to believe me in the slightest. "You don't think the clans of the L5 cluster would look to you for leadership if you offered it? The Long clan was one of the most powerful to ever to every settle out there. They would respect where you came from and what you've done for-  
  
"I don't care about the L5 colony cluster, and they wouldn't care in the slightest for me. I did what I did for justice, not for colony independence or for some definition of rights and duties. I did what I did for Meiren and for Master Long. It was for me and for what I thought was right. And Quatre was not like that. He was an inspiration to all of us, everything he did - even Zero. He was brilliant and kind and selfless. He was unflinching. I am none of those things. I doubt myself all the time - I did during the wars when I didn't know whether to join you or not, to fight for anything other than myself, when I killed Treize, when I joined with Dekim Barton. Quatre was better than all of us, and he was certainly better than me.."  
  
Duo watched me speak, searching for something in what I said, the brief flare of temper between us, already faded and gone. "Why do you idolize him like that?" he finally asked. "Because he's really not so different from you - you came from the same background as him; you fought for the colonies just like him, even if you claim it was for your own definition of justice. Hell, you were even twin angels of vengeance after his dad died and your colony self-destructed. He was totally screwed in the head after all that, just like you, and he-" Duo's throat closed on his words and he swallowed before trying again. "He couldn't get along in the new world any better than you could. He did worse than you; he ended up dead."  
  
For a moment, we were right back in his office, hunched over his body, trying to shake him awake, realizing that he didn't have a pulse, that his hands were cold, though his face and his chest were still warm. Duo tried CPR, practically beating on his breast bone. He yelled at me to breath for him, and I did, watching his chest rise as I blew into his mouth, lips chilly and soft against mine. But he was gone, and when we talked to the doctors at the hospital, they told us that his blood was so full of sleeping drugs, no amount of electric current would have woken his heart up again.  
  
I felt like he lay between us now, just an outline and a glimmer of bright hair. I felt like he'd been haunting me since I'd gotten here.  
  
"We all loved him," Duo insisted. "But you... I think maybe you were in love with him, whether you knew it or not."  
  
I looked up from the floor, away from the ghost of a pale hand resting near my knee. "You shouldn't speculate about things like that," I said, trying to sound threatening instead of shaken.  
  
Duo shrugged and appeared contrite. "Sorry, I guess. I've just been wondering about it for awhile, you know? You spent a lot of time with him when those charges were first brought against you, and I know he was prepared to put all of the Winner family's resources at your back." He lowered his voice so that I had to lean in to hear him. "Which is why it makes no sense that he killed himself when he did. And if Quatre- if he didn't drug himself to death, if someone else did it to him..." His brow wrinkled down into a fierce scowl. "Shit, if he was murdered, then, Wu, I see you in that same boat. Powerful family, even more powerful convictions - you and he were made of the same stuff."  
  
"Why are you not including yourself, Duo?" I asked softly. "The L2 White Fang members wanted you as their leader so badly, they would have sold off what little territory they had for you."  
  
He snorted and shrugged me off with practiced ease. "Please. I'm not ashamed of where I came from, but I've got no illusions about it either. I'm just space trash who happened to fall into an expensive hunk of metal that made me famous for about fifteen minutes."  
  
"You were the best pilot of all of us."  
  
"I'm nobody," he muttered with finality. He looked me in the eye. "And that's fine. I never envied anything Quatre had, or where you came from, the fact that you had a whole fucking clan; I never cared. Figured it kept me safer. Nobody would try to take what I didn't have. And I couldn't miss not having it. But I, uh, I fucked up because I did have friends. And it's pretty fucking low to try and take those away, but they did it anyway." He rubbed the back of his hand in his eyes and blinked furiously, whether from the grit he'd just rubbed into them or from tears, I didn't try to guess.  
  
"I don't care what you say, Chang; you're not safe here, whether you're like Quatre or Bennett or not. And I just wish there was something I could do to protect you. If I could get in here every day to make sure you made it back to your cell at night, I would do it. When Heero called to tell me that there'd been two homicides, I about had a heart attack. I yelled at him for, like, ten minutes for letting Prescott shove him out the door, for not barricading himself in your room with you, or at least leaving a gun under your pillow. And Heero, of all people, doesn't need someone yelling at him."  
  
Maybe it was how upset Duo had gotten that made me do it, or maybe it was my friendship with Karl and my increasing familiarity with how to touch someone, but before I could think better of it, I slid forward on my knees and grabbed him into a hard hug. He returned the embrace with equal strength, releasing a sharp breath against my neck and tucking his chin so hard against my shoulder that his pointy jaw dug painfully into the muscle.  
  
"I can't take it, you being here. I feel like one of these days I'll just lose it, and do something really stupid, and-"  
  
"Duo, shut up."  
  
"I am so fucking serious right now, Wufei."  
  
"I can tell, and the thought of you ghosting through the ventilation system to rescue me and pull me out from under Prescott's nose does have a certain appeal, since both of us have a flare for the dramatic, but try to at least think it through a little more before you make us both fugitives from the law. Again." It was easier to say these things facing the pile of uniforms behind him, rather than looking him in the eye. I could feel his heart thudding steadily in his chest and his breath beginning to slow as it puffed against the strands of hair at the back of my neck. His arms tightened and loosened with periodic spasms.  
  
"It'd be something to see," He murmured. "If only I still had Deathscythe, I could just step on the fence and you could walk out. I would make your exit one hell of a show, give all these punks something to remember you by."  
  
I laughed for his benefit and then drew away from him. "It was really foolish of you to come here like this," I scolded, though my voice didn't hold much rancor. "I have to get the next load in the dryer and fold all this mess by dinner."  
  
Duo sat back on his heels and took off his cap, raking his fingers through his hair and recomposing himself. "I can help you. It'll go faster that way."  
  
"That's an even dumber idea than sneaking in here."  
  
"I used to help you fold clothes when we lived together."  
  
I flushed and got to my feet, turning to grab a towel. "That was different, and I didn't want your help then, either."  
  
"You still want it now, right?"  
  
Tired of the relentlessness of this conversation, I whirled on him with a growl ready, only to find him folding a uniform in entirely the wrong way. He didn't look up from his effort to roll the top half of the uniform down over the bottom.  
  
"Even though I'm not a forensics expert and I don't have access to Preventer's military personnel files?"  
  
I snatched the uniform out of his hands and went to the metal table set up for just this purpose, folding the legs at the knees, then the sleeves back at the shoulders, then folding the whole thing in half and in half again, so that the tag showed and the collar was straight. "Don't be an idiot. And quit with the self-pitying attitude. It doesn't suit you at all."  
  
I felt him behind me and then I heard a low chuckle close to my ear. I finally looked his way when he draped one arm across my shoulders and leaned the other on the folding table. "Such a charmer." He'd managed to go from maudlin to, what was this - seductive? - in under fifteen seconds.  
  
"What part of 'don't be an idiot' didn't you understand, Maxwell?" I said this while staring at the muscle that joined arm to shoulder to chest, wondering inanely whether the brown hair curling in the shadow of his underarm was as soft as it looked.  
  
"Be safe buddy," he murmured, "and get to bed on time so I can come see you without sneaking in through the ventilation system."  
  
I looked up from the odd distraction of his armpit. "Wait, you really came through the-"  
  
He laughed, and I felt his fingers deftly untie the knot of the bandanna at the base of my skull. "Someone's coming," he whispered.  
  
I turned to look, shoving him behind me, catching the bandanna as it slid out of my hair. I watched a cranky older inmate shuffle by with a cart full of folded uniforms. He didn't so much as glance up as he passed. When I turned back to find Duo, he was gone.  
  
Letting out a great gust of a sigh, I flopped over backwards into the pile of towels, pulling several of them over my head. "Fuck," I said, voice muffled and intimate in my ears. I stayed there until I started to sweat in earnest and then got up to switch the wash to the drier.

+

I pressed him up against the slippery tiles of the shower wall, holding his hips steady with mine, boxing him in with my elbows on either side of his shoulders. He ran his hands up and down my sides, resting them at the base of my spine. "Anyone every tell you you've got an amazing body?" His pelvis thrust shallowly against mine and I lowered my head to his shoulder.  
  
"No."  
  
"Well, it's true, though you're probably better off not hearing it from too many people. Your ego would swell up beyond your control. It would need to be deflated somehow, and deflating an ego isn't fun, though I've gotten pretty good at it over the years."  
  
He was rambling a little, which was fine. He was trying to distract himself and me from the noises coming from the other corner of the shower. Four days after Basker and O'Malley's deaths and already their shoes had been filled. The poor kid up against the far wall probably had only gotten a week's rest, and Karl knew it could have just as easily been him were it not for our arrangement.  
  
"Yes, if there's one thing I know how to do, it's-" I raised my head and kissed him and he moaned into my mouth, more to block out the sound of the kid's strangled shout of pain than to express his enthusiasm for what we were doing. I hated putting on displays like this, but the benefits were worth it. I felt the men watching us, felt their evaluative stares, judging my ability to protect him, my ability to protect myself. I lowered one arm to pull his left leg up around my waist. I broke the kiss and kept my mouth by his ear.  
  
"I think I'm probably gay," I admitted. "And I thought you'd want to know."  
  
He spoke against my jaw, and I felt him smiling. "Damn. You mean I wasn't enough to get straight-as-an-arrow Chang to bend a little?"  
  
The abruptness of the confession somehow wasn't phasing either of us. "Sorry, Karl, but I guess I was already bent."


	11. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \--------------  
> Warnings: General not-niceness, to use Dacia's phrase

And things are happening here while we sleep  
I can feel it in my boiling brain  
and I am dreaming in blood-red color  
\- _"Evening in Stalingrad" Mountain Goats_  
  
_The bed is too tiny and he can't get comfortable, tossing and turning, dragging the sheet with him until it's wound around his legs, his shirt twisted around him, too. His pillow is damp with sweat and he can't find a place for his head to rest that doesn't smell of sickness and unease. He rolls over again and shoves at the body in bed with him, palm coming up against a bony spine. This boy groans and turns to him, feral young face flushed with fever, but instead of scooting away to give Wufei more room, the slides closer and wrapps a thin arm around his ribs, pulling their bodies closer together. Their skin is warm to the touch and they try to shift around each other, but fail to find a place to rest in such a tiny bed._  
  
_His mind can't not slow down from its fevered racing. He has tried to think of nothing, and yet, images and bits of sentences and songs flicker and repeat in long, convoluted cycles until he thinks he might scream. And the boy in bed with him will not let him be. They push and scratch and snarl silently at each other, fighting for space and for quiet, but there just isn't room. The boy clings to him, all elbows and ribs poking his aching skin. They rest for short spans of time, the boy's head on Wufei's chest, the hand on his hip that of a child. He thinks that maybe they are both twelve years old._  
  
_He needs real rest; he needs peace and quiet, and he can't get it with this boy in bed with him. And yet, he can't make him leave. He's tried to yell, to cry, to beg, anything for a respite from the constant presence of another sweaty body, from his mind's own dizzying confusion, but nothing comes out. The air is thick with illness and every time he breathes in to speak, he feels sicker, crazier, more helpless, until the boy in bed with him is all he can hold on to._  
  
I came awake abruptly, Onur's big hands on my shoulders, shaking me, voice right in my ear. "Wufei, wake up. You're dreaming. Snap out of it."  
  
I came fully awake the instant I felt the queasiness in my stomach and the tingling in my fingers. The room felt freezing, and my teeth chattered. "Move," I mumbled, shoving his hands away and trying to roll myself out of bed. The ground came up much faster than it should have and if it weren't for those big hands holding me under the arms, I would have fallen. As it was, he helped me stumble over to the toilet and gathered my hair off my face as I hunched forward over it. Then nothing happened.  
  
"Are you going to be sick?" he asked, readying himself for something ugly.  
  
"I don't know," I said thickly, only able to focus on how awful the cold steel felt against my forearms. My knees ached where they touched the floor, and my scalp tingled from Onur's firm grip on my hair. Chills ran all along my skin and my muscles shuddered with them. "Something's wrong," I slurred, leaning forward to rest my head on the back of my hand.  
  
"Yeah. You're sick."  
  
"'S'impossible. I haven't been sick since I was..." It'd probably been close to ten years, a nasty germ picked up from school, from one of the children training with Master Long.  
  
"Not impossible. This bug has been going around and those without immune boosters have all-"  
  
"My immune system was strengthened to fight off most strains of..." Three years. It had been three years since my system had been boosted with anti-virals. I sat back on my heels, too racked with chills to throw up. Onur knelt down beside me and touched the back of his hand to my cheeks and forehead. I flinched away from him. Not even my own mother had done such a thing. I tried to stand up and my muscles ached so fiercely that I could only fold back down to the floor.  
  
"You have a high fever, Wufei."  
  
"No, I don't; I'm freezing."  
  
"I'm taking you to the infirmary." He reached for me, and it felt like he left deep bruises wherever he touched me. He got one large arm under my knees and suddenly I was at least four feet off the ground, held against a broad, warm chest.  
  
"How? We're in prison. You can't just walk to the doctor from here." I pressed my forehead into his chest, relieving some of the pressure behind my eyes and in my temples. The rest of my body ached and throbbed, and I squirmed in his arms, feeling every hair on my body buzz with pain.  
  
"It's not a prison," he corrected automatically, walking me to the door of our cell and then shouting into the silence of the facility for help. His voice hurt my ears and I closed my eyes against the pain in my head. His arms tightened when I shivered harder and he went back to my bunk to pull my blanket from the bed, shifting me from one arm to the other like I weighed nothing until he had it wrapped around me and I could hold the sides closed against my chest. When he had me situated, I heard a pair of guards approach, shining a light into our cell that sent knives straight to the back of my skull. I groaned and Onur hissed at them to turn it off. A quick exchange took place between guard and inmate, which I was in no condition to follow, though I heard, "Very sick. Probably flu. Needs a clean bed." I wondered briefly if I'd done something to soil my mattress and couldn't bring myself to care. I wanted to curl up and sleep, but my head was filled with waking fever dreams; I knew if I closed my eyes they would only get worse.  
  
I realized we were moving again when the door clanged open and Onur was carrying me through the cellblock. I was too dizzy to focus on any of the silhouettes standing at the bars of their cells, and my stomach turned unpleasantly when I tried, so I turned into Onur's chest and shivered. "I haven't spoken to you in a week. Why are you doing this?"  
  
His answer rumbled in his chest. "Because I'm nearly twice your age, and thankfully age brings maturity. And aside from that, you'll get lots more people sick if you're not isolated."  
  
Thus began the longest two weeks of my life.

+

 _Wufei feels the boy coming when the air pressure changes, like a coming thunderstorm. He lies face down on his bed and listens for the sound of a child's bare feet slapping against tile. The bed still smells of sweat and illness, but he doesn't have the strength to move. Then the boy is there, scrawny and pale and dressed just like him in a white t-shirt and gray drawstring pants. The boy is angry, very angry. He is furious. He storms around the room and rages at the walls. Wufei watches the boy from his bed as he shouts and shouts, demanding that someone pay attention to his skinny fists beating the air and his small feet smacking the floor. He wonders distantly what the boy hopes to accomplish, making such a ruckus. He manages to turn himself onto his side without becoming too nauseous and then slides back as the boy comes to his bedside. The boy kneels on the floor and put his elbows on the mattress, reaching for him, resting a cool hand on his forehead, pushing back the damp hair that sticks to his face._  
  
_"What'd they do to you?" the boy asks. "Who did this?"_  
  
_Wufei tries to make his mouth work and can only mumble a few syllables that even he can't recognize. This only seems to anger the boy more and he turns away, yelling at no one._  
  
I watched him shouting and, for the life of me, couldn't figure out why Duo was so upset. He was in his dirty overalls, once again wearing a shirt that showed the muscles in his shoulders and he was yelling at the nurse - a tall woman who took absolutely no nonsense from anyone. I watched those long muscles bunch and coil under his skin as he gestured at her. She looked irritated, but not alarmed.  
  
"Mr. Maxwell, please control yourself. We're treating all of his symptoms; he's not in any pain."  
  
"He's barely _conscious_! He's completely vulnerable right now! How can you be so _fucking_ irresponsible after what happened last week? You can't leave him like this!"  
  
She put her hands on her hips. "He's ill, Mr. Maxwell. He has a very serious strain of flu, and if we don't control his symptoms, he will be even more dehydrated than he already is. Believe me, this is for his own safety."  
  
I swallowed thickly and tried to focus on the needle going into my arm, wondered exactly what was going into my blood stream, figured it kept me from camping out by the toilet, and stopped worrying about it. I dimly remembered hours and hours spent waiting on the bathroom floor for the nausea to come and go. Sometimes the nurse was with me - I thought that she was actually quite nice when she wasn't being harassed by my belligerent best friend - and sometimes I was alone. I remembered the moment she'd convinced the doctor of the severity of the situation, and they'd plucked me up off the floor, jammed an anti-nausea shot into my thigh, and started pumping me full of intravenous fluids. Among other things. I'd apparently been given a sedative as well.  
  
Which was probably why Duo was so upset. He was by my bed, kneeling on the floor and pushing open one of my eyelids, presumably to get a look at my pupils. "Talk to me, Wu," he whispered. "Tell me what happened."  
  
"I..." What did he mean, 'what happened?' "I got sick."  
  
I was on my side, the arm with the IV stretched out in front of me. Thankfully, it wasn't in the crook of my arm, but was in one of the large veins running down along the side of my wrist. He pressed his fingers to the adhesive holding the needle in place. "Did someone do this to you? Try to think back to what you ate." So maybe he wasn't upset about the sedative.  
  
"Duo," I started, struggling to put together a coherent explanation. "With a weak immune system and no boosters from the... the Doctors."  
  
He hunched his shoulders and made quiet shushing noises. "Okay, buddy. Easy."  
  
"You got pneumonia after yours -"  
  
Just then, two guards arrived in the doorway to my room. "Was this the one giving you trouble?" the one asked the nurse.  
  
The nurse nodded. "He threatened to remove the patient from the infirmary and then he threatened me when I told him that he obviously couldn't do that."  
  
Duo was on his feet faster than I could track his movements, shouting at both the nurse and the guards. I tried to interrupt, to tell him that I was just sick, that sometimes people got sick, but he'd gone a little crazy and he didn't appear to hear me. I tried to sit up when the two guards shoved him up against the wall, but the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and turned a valve on my IV. I felt the fluid entering my arm abruptly cool.

+

 _The boy curls up against him and proceeds to drool onto his t-shirt. Wufei doesn't like not being able to move in the small bed, pressed down by the slight weight of another body, but it is comforting to have a small hand pressed against his shoulder and soft hair brushing his jaw. He stares at the ceiling and tries to rest. He doesn't know whether he is asleep or awake._  
  
After maybe a week, I awoke to find Karl in bed with me. When I tried to kick him out, he groaned pitifully and I realized he was sick too. One of the other men in the sick room had gone and now I saw a stack of Karl's books on a table two beds down. It made sense that he'd gotten whatever bug I'd picked up.  
  
"You have your own bed you know."  
  
"You're warmer," he muttered, starting to shiver.  
  
I realized that my shirt was soaked. I pulled my arm from under the blankets and sweat instantly dried on my skin. I felt my forehead and it was slippery and cool. "I think my fever broke," I said.  
  
"Hurray for you," Karl grumbled, molding himself as tightly as he could to my side and pulling the blankets up to his ears. Where his arm wrapped around my middle, my stomach was calm.  
  
"I think I'm getting better."  
  
"No, you're not."  
  
"Yes, I -"  
  
"Does your throat hurt?"  
  
I swallowed and winced. My ears crackled and I felt a dull pain connecting ear to throat. "How did you know?"  
  
His teeth chattered for a moment when he opened his mouth to speak. "Because I got the digest version of what you have. Vomiting for a day; shitting rivers the next, and now enough pressure in my head to push my brain out my ears."  
  
"That's disgusting."  
  
"You asked."  
  
"How long have I been here?"  
  
"Almost a week."  
  
"How long have you been here?"  
  
"Three days."  
  
I swallowed and winced again. My throat hurt worse than it did one minute ago. "Shit, I'm not getting better."  
  
"Not really, no."  
  
I slumped back against the damp pillows and stared at the ceiling. I realized that Karl was lying on the arm that'd had an IV, but when I flexed it underneath him, I couldn't feel it poking into my skin. The needle was out of my arm, and after that, the dreams with the skinny sick boy didn't come back.

+

Sick as a dog.  
  
It was a stupid expression, and I'd never met a sick dog before, one that I knew was sick, anyway. And yet, sitting propped up in the bed and filling waste basket after waste basket with soggy tissues, I really did feel like some sick creature that wasn't quite human but was aware enough to know that something was seriously wrong with it.  
  
I shared the sick room with three others, one of whom was Karl. The other two were a pair of rowdy Dekim Barton disciples. They'd pissed me off during the second war, and they certainly pissed me off now, though there wasn't much I could do about it. They weren't as sick as I was, and so they shouted and played cards when the nurse wasn't in the room, and all I could do was imagine different scenarios in which I could silence them long enough to let me sleep and recover so I could silence them permanently. Occasionally I looked up to see Karl glaring at them from his bed, and that made me feel a little better. He was recovering faster than me, and my sinuses were too painfully full to allow for a good glare of my own.  
  
Onur brought my assignments to me every evening before curfew and asked me if I'd been able to complete any of the ones he'd left from previous days. I told him I could barely focus enough to get through a paragraph, let alone an entire unit in pre-Colony Chicano literature. He didn't stay for more than a few minutes, and he didn't say much of anything to Karl. After Basker and O'Malley, and the conversation we'd had outside our room, he seemed to have finally given up on me as someone he'd call a friend. He still wanted me to do my homework, though.  
  
The fever dreams essentially stopped, though my brain still got stuck on bits of conversation, words and images, that would keep me awake at night until the cold medicine finally forced me to sleep. Three days ago, it was "Fettuccine Alfredo" which I didn't even like, and for the last two days it'd been "strangulation."  
  
The previous week was a blur of barely remembered moments that stretched backward in my mind until the day before I got sick, which had been like any other day. That day stood out with stark clarity compared to the shadowy tunnel of the week that followed. I felt like something serious and disturbing had happened while I was useless and basically dead to the world, but Karl didn't know and I didn't want to ask the nurse.  
  
The doctor came to speak with me after I'd come out of the worst of it and told me what I'd already guessed. She spoke in hushed tones with her back to the other inmates in the sick room and showed me my chart with lots of numbers that meant absolutely nothing. "Quite frankly, I've never seen a system like yours," she murmured. "Your body is, well, it's been altered by all these drugs and...," Here she pointed to a list of chemicals that I vaguely remembered seeing years ago before Master O used them to make me into a Gundam Pilot. "...and this combination would work to make you resistant to essentially every illness known three years ago. But, unfortunately, viruses mutate and become stronger. When they meet a system like yours, they adapt."  
  
"So, what, I've got the Super Flu?"  
  
She smiled. "More or less. I wish we had known about your unique chemistry when you first were admitted. Usually these things sort themselves out within a few days, but you kept getting sicker, and if your nurse hadn't insisted that you were getting dangerously dehydrated, well..."  
  
"I get the picture; thank you." I remembered last winter when Duo came down with pneumonia, that particular strain of it managing to get around his outdated immune boosters, to put him flat on his back for two full weeks. I didn't see him for two months, and when I finally did, he was thinner, paler, and more ornery than when we'd been stuck suffocating on the Lunar Base. He hadn't been afraid though, while he was sick - something about him living through another plague that had killed off everyone but him.  
  
So far as I knew, neither Heero nor Trowa had succumbed to a mutated germ that managed to get through their defenses. I suspected this was because they worked for Preventers and Une didn't want her top field operatives coming down with a cold while they rotted in the Rome office, keeping tabs on drug dealers in the suburbs. Their immune systems were as up to date as any well-protected computer.  
  
I'd been humming a favorite song of Duo's, trying to replace the word "strangulation" with something a bit more pleasant when Trowa walked through the door with a book and a glass of ice water, and I suddenly remembered the serious, disturbing incident that my brain had been skipping around for the past week.  
  
"Duo!"  
  
The volume of my shout startled me and made my head hurt and Trowa looked up with a worried glint in his visible eye. Then he pressed his lips into a thin smile. "Boy, you really are sick."  
  
I pushed myself further into a sitting position and threw the blankets off my legs, readying myself for the hike out to the nurse's station. Trowa was at my bedside in two long strides, putting down both the book and the cup and wrestling me none too gently back under the covers. He pressed one hand to my shoulder the other to my forehead and scowled down at me. "Don't even think about it. You idiot," he said with perfect aplomb.  
  
I shoved his hand away from my forehead. "Don't _do_ that. I am so tired of people touching my forehead. I don't have a fever. And don't be a moron," I snapped. "I didn't think you were Duo. I have the flu, not a degenerative eye disease."  
  
Trowa straightened and reminded me just how much he towered over me when we stood facing each other. He looked like a giant now, standing over my bed with arms folded across his chest. I glared up at him, and rearranged my thoughts, pausing to blow my nose. "What I meant was, have you spoken with or seen Duo within the last week?"  
  
Trowa's mouth tightened and he nodded.  
  
"I think he came to see me last week, but I may have just dreamed it." I tried to enter the long dark cave that was last week and extract the right memory. I closed my eyes and felt around. "He was here, and he was upset. He yelled a lot and his voice hurt my head. Someone pushed him against that wall." I opened my eyes to follow where my finger pointed, where I remembered seeing him with his cheek pressed to the cinder blocks. He looked at me with big, scared eyes. "And I think he was in his pajamas." I looked down at myself. "Like these." I looked back up at Trowa. "Does that sound right?" Trowa's eyebrow twitched. "No, no, why would he come here in his pajamas? That's ridiculous. But why would he come here and yell and get himself kicked out in the first place? Maybe I dreamed the whole thing."  
  
"Because he thought someone had poisoned you. He got here to visit and was told you had a stomach bug, and he assumed the worst after what had happened with you and Heero the week before." He turned away to pull a chair closer and folded his long limbs into it. Then he picked up the cup and handed it to me. "Drink this. You need to replace all the fluids you're blowing into those tissues."  
  
I accepted the cup and felt my chest sink in on itself. "You mean, he really did come here and get himself kicked out for threatening the nurse?"  
  
"And the guards and the other patients."  
  
"Fantastic." I took a swallow of water. "And how did you find this out?"  
  
Trowa picked up his book and held it in his lap, his long fingers holding it in a white-knuckled grip. "He was in my apartment and Cathy was making him a drink when Heero and I got home from work." I groaned and rubbed a hand over my face, cringed and then wiped my hand on a clean tissue. "We all deal with you being here in different ways. Duo..."  
  
"Isn't getting any better at dealing."  
  
Trowa shrugged. "He used to run off to L2 and work with Howard so he could avoid what happened to you and Quatre. I personally think this is better for him. He should face what's happened. He shouldn't run."  
  
I took a few more swallows and decided against mentioning his appearance in the laundry. No, Duo certainly wasn't running anymore. He was making his presence known around here to a dangerous degree. "I suppose I should thank him for making such an effort."  
  
"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you haven't already."  
  
I snorted in derision and then coughed. Trowa conspicuously leaned away from me. I glared at him and spoke around a tissue. "Why do you have these expectations? Are you still operating under the assumption that, deep down, I've got some soft, mushy spot for all of you, that I only need to be put in the right circumstances, that I need to catch the flu, for example, and I will reveal to all of you the depths of my gratitude for butting into _my_ life and _my_ problems and insisting upon staying?"  
  
Trowa leaned forward in his seat again. "Yes," he said softly.  
  
I opened my mouth, ready with a sharp retort, but the nurse came in then with my next round of painkillers, decongestant and cough suppressant. I took the pills silently and washed them down with the water that Trowa brought. Then I started an internal countdown to the time when a pleasant fog of painlessness and easy breathing would roll in.  
  
"I don't see why," I continued when she left. "We wore the same uniform in the 2nd war, but we were on entirely different sides. I was never one of you. Just your age, your size, in the same machine as you."  
  
Trowa's normally chilly features momentarily went even colder. "We're not talking about me, here."  
  
I leaned back against the pillow. "Ah. I'm sorry."  
  
Tongue loosened with nearly two weeks of illness and a steady supply of drugs to dull the pain and help me sleep, a long list of things Trowa and I had never talked about opened up in front of me, only a second away from spilling out of my mouth. Images still as vivid as photographs filled my head - sitting in the cockpit of my Gundam on that very last day, with the citizens of the city crowded at my feet, shouting up at me that the fighting was over, that they wouldn't let me fight anymore. It was so dark, I could barely see my hands on the controls. The internal lights of the cockpit were off; I'd powered down when it became obvious that if I took another step, people were prepared to throw themselves under the feet of the Gundam to stop the fighting from continuing. I'd thought that Heero was dead, at the bottom of the ocean, and that, as soon as the hatch opened, I would be executed.  
  
I remembered my shock when I was merely detained with Trowa and a number of Dekim Barton's other followers. I remembered watching him leave after his story was cleared; it'd been the right kind of story. He'd been working with Heero and Duo to bring down Mariemeia. My story was undeniably suspicious; I'd been fighting because I didn't know how to do anything else. I didn't _want_ to do anything else, and I didn't want people like me to be useless, to not have a purpose.  
  
It was days before they let me go, and it was Duo who came to pick me up and take me to his shitty hotel room in Brussels where he'd been waiting, his life on hold until the new world order decided whether or not we were free to go.  
  
"Did you know he came to pick me up from holding?" I asked, since we weren't talking about Trowa.  
  
"Duo?" He looked vaguely surprised.  
  
I nodded. "We went to London as soon as we were cleared. He found the place and paid for a whole year in cash from..." I glanced up at the other men in the sick room, keeping my voice low. "From one of his closed out accounts. I slept a lot. He spent all day wandering around the city." The numbing fog was starting to roll in, and with it, sinuses that stayed clear after I blew my nose. "He would come home with all these applications to different schools in and around the city - liberal arts schools for me, and tech schools for him. He planned on getting his certification in small engine repair. He said that we had to learn new skills, that otherwise, a couple of 16-year-old ex-terrorists would never be able to make their way in the world. I remember thinking that I'd never met a 16-year-old who'd been so pragmatic about our situation."  
  
Trowa was watching me and leaning forward in his chair, appearing to enjoy the story. He shook his head, bemused. "We didn't know you lived together."  
  
I shrugged. "Yes, well." My gut knotted a little at the memories that followed. "It didn't last very long. I kicked him out after a month."  
  
Trowa's brow dipped, and I could tell that he was disappointed. "Wufei, why would kick him out?"  
  
Defensive instincts, sharpened to a razor's edge here, and only slightly dulled by the medication, reared up instantly at the scolding way he used my given name. "Because I never _asked_ for his help. And I was like a project for him! Neither of us knew how to live in a city like London, where we didn't have to fight - where we weren't _allowed_ to fight - and Duo was using me as a way to feel better about it, to feel normal. He wanted so badly to be well-adjusted and productive and happy, and I resented him for relying on me to do it. He wanted to share insecurities, and I didn't. So I told him to leave, said I'd be fine on my own. I told him he should figure things out for himself, too." I paid attention to my slowing breaths, not liking the feeling of chemical drowsiness but not fighting it either. And I was glad to finally share this with someone. The only other person who had known about Duo's and my brief stint together was Quatre.  
  
Trowa looked as though pieces of a long-undone puzzle were falling into place for him. "That was when he moved in with Hilde and helped out with her scrap yard." He snorted a soft laugh. "And what a disaster that was."  
  
"Hmm," I muttered, still remembering exactly what it had felt like after he'd moved out. The silence and emptiness of the flat had been wonderful compared to his constant noise and energy - his messes and his... nearness.  
  
"Do you regret kicking him out now?"  
  
The ease of this conversation was almost certainly drug-induced. I shrugged. "Not really. I only had a handful of months to myself anyway before the trial and the start of my sentence. I enjoyed the solitude while it lasted."  
  
"Did Duo contact you after he left?"  
  
I sniffed and then blew my nose, wishing congestion could block out the memory of that conversation. "Not until the trial. I didn't hear from him until he found out how much trouble I was in."  
  
Trowa nodded. "Heero called him."  
  
"He showed up like nothing had happened, like I hadn't told him to pack up and leave me alone. He was just as persistent as he was before, when I'd just been released from holding. I didn't understand why."  
  
Trowa twitched his bangs out of his eyes before they fell right back where they had been, only briefly exposing the scar over his eyebrow. "I don't really get it either, honestly," and I attributed my inability to discern sincerity from sarcasm to the drugs. I looked up at the ceiling and then had to lean forward as my sinuses drained down the back of my throat. I coughed and spit into a tissue. "Especially after the way you shut him out," Trowa added, like he couldn't help himself.  
  
I rolled my eyes. "He's not a saint, you know. He's nosy and pushy and loud and I was 16 and how was I supposed to know how to live with someone my age? I hadn't slept in the same living space with someone I knew in years."  
  
Trowa held up a conciliatory hand. "You're right on all counts, Chang, but your time in exile is almost up. Duo will be a lot harder to shake off when you don't have official visiting hours and guards to escort him off the premises. We'll all be a lot harder to get rid of."  
  
It was times like those that made me wish I had glasses to glare over - the origins of that device probably something like, "I don't need prescription magnification to know that what you just said was stupid."  
  
"Unless you're planning on taking off for the other side of the world as soon as you're out."  
  
Despite my sour expression, I gave that a fair bit of thought, considering what it would mean to leave this place and leave everyone I knew behind, supposedly in an effort to start over. Une intended for me to join Preventers and devote my life to protecting and enforcing the peace. There were offices all over the world - I would certainly be able to find a position at one of them. Preventers were understaffed everywhere. The thought of finding somewhere far away where no one knew my history and I received a new name by which all my coworkers would know me was appealing - probably for the same reason I'd been glad to be rid of Duo after kicking him out of the flat (a flat which he had paid for, and which had been by all rights his for the year.) "But I couldn't leave everyone behind. It would be irresponsible," I finished, not realizing I'd spoken that last bit aloud until I caught Trowa's eye and saw that he was smiling, looking like he thought I'd finally said something intelligent for once. He suddenly reminded me of Meiran's grandmother when her whole family visited, and I had the feeling that I'd just committed myself to a lifetime of Sunday dinners.

+

My very full bladder woke me up in the middle of the night, and I quickly rolled out of bed, looking for my flip-flops with my toes. When I found them, I grabbed a tissue and headed for the bathroom, blowing my nose as I went. I drank so much water during the day at the nurse's insistence that I was getting up to pee multiple times a night, which was obnoxious to say the least, but during the day it broke up the monotony of hours on end spent in a hospital bed. I'd been marking the days by numbers of trips to bathroom, rather than the assignments piling up from my classes. It was also new and exciting to go into a real bathroom whenever I wanted, rather than having to ask permission or piss in the steel toilet of my cell.  
  
I nodded to the nurse as I passed him at his station and he lifted a hand in greeting. He smiled more easily than did the day nurses, probably because he had a lot less to deal with than they did - most of his patients were unconscious. I closed the door behind me and whistled quietly just because no one would hear me, and I went into one of the stalls rather than using the urinal just because I could. As exciting as my bathroom privileges were, however, I was looking forward to my discharge tomorrow. Karl was getting out, too, though I, unlike him, got 'light duty' for the next week to help rebuild my strength. I would attend classes, but my shifts in the kitchen and the laundry were either shortened or limited to light lifting. It wasn't worth the week of delirium or the week of body and sinus aches, congestion, and coughing, but it was something to look forward to.  
  
I hit the flusher with my foot and went to the sink to wash my hands, wincing at my red nose and puffy eyes in the mirror. My collar bone stood out sharper than I thought it should and when I dried my hands on a paper towel, I could see the veins more clearly, like there was less flesh covering them. Hospitals could be good places to identify illnesses, but they weren't good for complete recovery. Only a return to my normal routine would really do that. Onur was a much quieter sleeper than the goons I was currently rooming with, and he didn't he crawl in bed with me, as Karl had been doing pretty regularly.  
  
I left the bathroom and headed back to bed, again nodding to the nurse before turning the corner. Just as I was about to come through the doorway into the room, though, I heard low voices, both of which I recognized - one was Karl and the other was Officer Paul Brandt. Instantly wide awake, I listened hard for sounds of a struggle. I listened for Karl's distress, knowing how much he disliked Brandt, but I only heard quiet conversation.  
  
Karl's voice was low, though I heard every word. "Did you tell her everything I said, every name on that list?"  
  
"Yeah, yeah, every last one of them. I didn't forget any."  
  
"What did she say?"  
  
"Not much, crazy bitch. She just looked mean."  
  
"She didn't say anything? Tell me, Brandt."  
  
A sigh. "She said she'd look into it, said she'd check it out. Shit, lighten up."  
  
"And what about Chang? Did you warn her about Chang?"  
  
"Course I did. Wufei's messing in shit he shouldn't be, and I told her that."  
  
I still hated hearing my name come out of his mouth, though I hated what they were saying more.  
  
I realized that I was breathing quickly, and that I was wheezing a bit. I felt a cough coming on and swallowed hard. My ears burned and the joints in my fingers ached with how hard I pushed my fingers against the wall.  
  
"And what did she say when you told her that?"  
  
"She agreed. Said she'd consider an appropriate course of action."  
  
"You will tell me as soon as she decides to do anything. You'll tell me before she does it."  
  
"You know, you're not the one who should be giving out orders, here."  
  
Karl snorted softly. "You've only _ever_ followed orders."  
  
"Maybe," Brandt admitted. "But I don't do anything for free. You owe me big time for this, so what do I get?"  
  
I could almost hear Karl smirking. "Sometime I'll let you watch him fuck me."  
  
I felt sick. And a cough was about to burst out of my lungs, so I turned and fled back to the bathroom, shutting the door and wishing desperately that it locked. I grabbed some toilet paper and coughed and hacked into it, holding my breath when, a few seconds later, I heard Brandt leave, the nurse at the desk calling, "Goodnight, Paul."  
  
I stared at myself in the mirror again and focused on slowing my heart rate. I closed my eyes and looked for my center, tried to go into a light meditative trance so that when I went back to my bed, Karl wouldn't know that I'd heard anything. I held onto the sink and tried to think of nothing.  
  
When I slid under the covers a few minutes later, I breathed slow and deep and stared up at the ceiling. I wished that Onur were in the next bed over. At about three in the morning, Karl got out of bed and shuffled toward me, his flip-flops noisy in the otherwise silent room. I lifted the blanket and sheet for him and he climbed in, wrapping one arm around my ribs and butting his head against my shoulder. He curled one leg over mine and rubbed the end of his nose against my sleeve, falling asleep a few seconds later, thanks to his own dose of drugs. I lay awake and watched him for the remaining few hours of the night.


	12. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \---------  
> Warnings: Blood! Violence!

I am right here where you want me  
do what you brought me out here for.  
_\- "Family Happiness" Mountain Goats_  
   
"I think I might be in some trouble."  
   
Rorty put his feet up on his desk and leaned back in his chair to adjust the air conditioner in his window so it blew right at us. The cool air felt good, but did nothing to dry the nervous sweat under my arms.  
  
"Screwing up with your school work again?" he asked amicably.  
  
"Mm." I looked down at my hands. "Well, that remains an issue."  
  
"But I'm assuming that's not why you're here. You've never come on your own before to talk to me, so I can't imagine that it would be about your classes."  
  
"Right." I twitched my heel up and down on the floor in front of my chair and pulled Duo's bandanna out of my hair, winding it around my wrist. I wasn't normally fidgety. Duo was a fidgeter, and when he would fidget, I always stopped him, either by polite request or with physical force if he wouldn't listen. Rorty watched me fidget and I watched myself fidget and didn't try to stop.  
  
I'd been afraid before, when I was younger, after Meiran died and just before I went out to fight. I was afraid of being injured or of some freak accident that I would never see coming, a bit of space debris striking Nataku at just the wrong point, the cockpit depressurizing. I was prepared for death in battle, but smaller things got under my skin because I couldn't anticipate them.  
  
I was afraid now because I didn't know what was going to happen next. My stomach was heavy with it. I thought I probably kept it from Karl and Onur pretty well and no one else bothered with me long enough to notice much, but my guts were tying themselves in knots, and I hadn't been able to get Karl's conversation with Brandt out of my head for the last 72 hours. It had to be Prescott he'd been talking about. Why else would he need an officer to speak for him? I'd thought at first that maybe he'd been trying to get in touch with a woman inmate, but really - realistically - the only person who would need to be 'warned' about me, and who would have the most interest in the lists of names we'd been compiling, was Prescott. Aside from Dorothy Catalonia, I didn't know anyone in the women's block beyond the faces I remembered from Mariemeia's followers. Dorothy and I had never spoken and so far as I knew, she was dealing with her sentence like an aristocrat - by pretending it wasn't happening.  
  
No, the only 'she' Karl could have been referring to was Prescott. Which meant I was sleeping with the person who meant to turn me in. Which meant I'd been an idiot to trust him. Which meant I was fucked.  
  
I tried to be objective and analytical. Would Prescott be angry that I was suspicious of the 'faction violence' cover story for all four of the murders here, including Vasil Wasyliw's from two years ago? Would she be upset that I thought at least two of their deaths were for other, more political reasons? Would she think it inappropriate that I considered the population of RCNP a pool of both potential victims and scapegoats for murder? Realistically, how would she react to finding out that I thought her administration was responsible for ordering their deaths, if not directly carrying them out? Would Karl have told Brandt to tell her that part? Why not? If he were going to warn her, he would probably mention where I placed the blame.  
  
But what had really kept me up the last few nights was whether he'd told Brandt to mention Duo. Because, if the answers to my questions were mostly 'yes,' then Duo and I were both in a lot of trouble. I didn't know exactly what kind, and I didn't want to think the worst. I wanted to warn Duo, but I didn't know what to tell him. I couldn't just say, 'Run,' because he wouldn't. Even though he wasn't allowed on the premises now after his rash behavior while I was sick, Heero and Trowa had informed me that he was still working with Sam and that he had no plans to leave. He'd probably do something crazy if I told him about Karl, like he said he would in the laundry. He might even -  
  
"Chang?"  
  
"Hm?" I looked up and took a slow, calming breath.  
  
Rorty looked at me with open concern. He rubbed a hand through his short dark hair and then dropped his feet to the floor. "You're kinda worryin' me, here. If it's not your classes, then what is it? Is someone giving you trouble?"  
  
I shook my head. "No, it's not that."  
  
He nodded, looking me over, probably noticing that I still looked like hell after two weeks in bed - that, and the fidgeting. He watched me thread the bandanna between my fingers and then pull it tight. "You've always been able to handle yourself around here, I know. But some of these guys can be pretty cruel." He leaned his elbows on his desk. "Is this about Bergsen? You two have banded together, right?"  
  
My head snapped up and his eyes widened a bit, knowing instantly, because he could read my face like a book, that he'd hit a nerve. He showed me his palms. "Whoa, whoa; I didn't mean it like that. What happens between you and Karl is none of my business until you make it my business."  
  
I swallowed a few times, unwinding the bandanna from my fingers, then winding it around my wrist again. "It is about Karl," I said. "I'm not sure I can actually trust him, like I thought I could."  
  
Rorty leaned back again, sensing that the abrupt tension between us had been diffused. "He is pretty shifty, but you two have been friends since you got here, right? You would know that about him."  
  
I nodded. "Right. I do know that about him."  
  
I hadn't known whether I could talk to Onur about this or not. I wasn't ready for an 'I told you so' lecture from him, and right now, it felt good to talk to Rorty, even if I wasn't saying much. Rorty didn't think in terms of 'crisis,' and I was leaning perilously close to that category right then.  
  
"Karl is strange, and I don't think he trusts anybody" - least of all me; he was turning me in - "but I had thought that, after two years, we had enough of a bond, that the... that he wouldn't be so shifty around me."  
  
Rorty nodded. "Do you want to tell me what he did to betray your trust?"  
  
It was on the tip of my tongue. How hard would it be to tell Rorty that I'd been considering alternate reasons for Bejamin Bennett's death, and that I knew Basker and O'Malley were strangled rather than knifed - that neither fit with the 'faction violence' explanation. What would he do? Was my suspicion in itself dangerous? Surely not; after Bennett's death, Rorty had told me he was frustrated with how Prescott was handling the investigation. He'd invited me to tell him what I thought, who I thought might have been responsible. Maybe if I told him now, if I was up front with him about what I thought was going on, he could take what I knew and look deeper, be the ally I needed, help me where Duo couldn't.  
  
But it was too much of a risk. I could ask him to turn off the tape recorder and he probably would, and he still wouldn't be a friend.  
  
"I'm sorry," I said.  
  
"You're afraid of consequences?"  
  
"I have no idea what they would be, if there would be any."  
  
"I see." He scratched his head. "Well, I'm not sure I can help you if you don't tell me the problem."  
  
"How easy is to extend someone's sentence?" I asked instead. "If Karl gets me in trouble, how easy would it be for Prescott to make me stay here?"  
  
Rorty frowned. "She would have to present a convincing case to the Board. She'd have to request the money to keep you here. She'd have to go through an ethics committee. It'd be a pain in the ass."  
  
I nodded. "Could I appeal it?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Would I need a lawyer?"  
  
He rolled his eyes. "Yes, you'd need a lawyer, but you should really take a few steps back and try talking to Karl first. Sort it out with him before you gird yourself for battle. Prescott may be a hard ass, but she's not interested in torturing people. She wants you out of here as much as you do, believe me."  
  
Somehow, I didn't find that comforting. I chose to think, instead, about how I could get in touch with Une or, if she couldn't help, the Winners. I'd had a good relationship with the lawyer Quatre had found for me, namely because she was one of his sisters and she'd sounded just like him when she spoke. I was sure she would help again if I -  
  
"Chang?" I raised my eyes to his. "Don't worry yet. If you don't want to talk to me, and you're not ready to talk to Karl, talk to someone you do trust." I nodded, too distracted to really take what he said to heart. I stood up to go and he stood up, too. "Go to someone you can be honest with, and then if you still need advice from me, legal or otherwise, I'm here." He reached out to shake my hand and clasped it firmly, giving it a good shake so that I looked directly at him.  
  
"Thank you," I said, meaning it sincerely, though I didn't feel any better.

+

The next day I did what I thought I'd never do and pushed Karl into one of the library carrels, cornering him and aggressively shoving my hands up his shirt, gripping his ribs and sliding one hand up to his shoulder blade. His t-shirt slid up his chest and I watched him breathe slowly, with his diaphragm. I pressed my thigh between his legs and he rolled his hips against me, looking up at me through pale eyelashes, mouth quirked.  
  
"How much do you want me, Chang, to bring me here?" he asked, hand dropping to rest on the sleeves tied around my waist.  
  
We were pressed chest to chest and I leaned back a little to look at him, his yellow hair flopped in his face, heavy with sweat and dirt.  
  
"Sometimes, not very much at all," I said. I pressed a hard kiss on his mouth, running my tongue along his three broken teeth. "Sometimes, enough." I tugged at his shirt and he lifted his arms so I could pull it off, but before it came free, I yanked it back down and behind him, pinning his arms and blindfolding him with the collar. I watched him blink rapidly through the thin fabric, saw his breath catch, felt him jerk once against my hands at this abrupt loss of control. I leaned in close and breathed against his neck. "Sometimes I want to hurt you, just to see if you'll let me, like you let the others."  
  
Karl rubbed himself against the wall of the carrel, like he was scratching his back, staring sightless into my eyes. "You do whatever you want."  
  
I kept the shirt fisted in my hand and guided him to the desk bolted to the floor in the middle of the cubicle. I pushed his hips against it with mine and bent him forward over top of it, my hand in his hair. "How much do you want me, Karl?"  
  
He laughed and shoved his ass back against my crotch, inviting me to push forward. "Enough."  
  
And it was the answer I expected. Enough to like me. Enough to use me. Enough to get me to trust him. Enough so that all I could feel when I thought of his quiet, awful words with Brandt was humiliation. He'd humiliated me without even a word to my face.

+

"Why, exactly, does this conversation need to take place in the laundry? I should be in our room now. And you should be finishing your shift. Curfew is in an hour."  
  
"I know that, Onur. I've been here as long as you. I'm aware when curfew is. Please just come with me and don't make a scene." I said this quietly, through my teeth, as we passed through the mess hall and towards the rear of the facility. I smelled soap and felt the heat of the driers as we got close and I turned to glare at him over my shoulder. "I need to talk to you, and this is the safest place I could think of."  
  
"Safe?"  
  
"No one will hear us."  
  
Onur's wide mouth pressed itself into a scowl. "You haven't spoken to me about anything in weeks. Why the sudden change of heart? Are your grades so bad that you need me to go to the teachers on your behalf?"  
  
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, facing forward again. "As if I would ever go to you for that kind of help, and believe me, school is the last thing on my mind."  
  
As soon as we reached the cavernous laundry, he grabbed my sleeve and jerked me to a stop. I gestured that we should move behind a few piles of clean uniforms, and grudgingly, he followed me.  
  
I'd waited two more days after we fucked in the library and Karl had given me no indication that anything was out of the ordinary between us. I'd seen no sign of Prescott, and Brandt hadn't looked my way twice. Trying to fall asleep in my bunk, well after curfew, I had lain awake, watching Onur snore quietly in his bunk across the room. At breakfast, I'd approached him with a murmured apology for my rudeness over the past weeks and a quiet request that he allow me to talk to him now, to ask his advice as someone I trusted.  
  
He looked at me now with his arms crossed over his barrel of a chest and waited.  
  
"I - well, you remember my friend Heero, how Prescott spotted the two of us at the scene of Basker and O'Malley's murders."  
  
He nodded. "He was difficult to miss, as I recall."  
  
"Right, and I thought I would be in trouble for that, for getting involved in business that wasn't mine, for pushing a Preventer into RCNP affairs."  
  
"Sounds about right."  
  
"Since then, there haven't been any repercussions from that incident, even though I know that Prescott was angry. And, I think that maybe she's been in touch with someone close to me, instead of confronting me directly. I think Karl is getting a facility officer to speak for him to Prescott, about me, about the steps I've taken to find out for myself what really happened to Benji, Basker and O'Malley and Vasil Wasyliw."  
  
The familiar frown line between his brows deepened. "To what end?"  
  
I stared at him. "What do you mean, 'To what end?'"  
  
Onur put his chin in one hand, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and spoke quietly. I had to strain to hear him over the noise of the machines I was supposed to be monitoring. "I mean, what would Karl have to gain from ratting on you? You two having been concocting wild allegations for months now; what purpose would it serve telling Prescott about them? Have you actually found anything?"  
  
I flushed at his easy dismissal of what had been Karl's and my obsession. "Onur, I told him - and he said he agreed - that I thought RCNP administrators were having former war leaders _killed_. I was ready to pin the blame on Prescott! I - I asked my best friend to see if he could find any evidence of my suspicions. I involved someone else in what I'm now beginning to think were paranoid delusions brought on by restlessness and boredom! I was thinking in terms of hunches that I thought Karl shared, and now..."  
  
Beginning to believe that I was genuinely on the verge of panic, Onur put a hand on my shoulder, giving me a firm shake. "And now what?"  
  
"Now, I don't know what's going to happen to me."  
  
I looked up at him and his frown was lifting. "What do you mean? Have you done anything wrong?"  
  
My mouth fell open. "What...? How can you be so casual about - " I tried again. "Every time I _mentioned_ Benji or Vasil, you practically jumped down my throat for speculating, as if it were something dangerous to do. Now Karl's about to take those speculations to Prescott and you're asking me whether I've done anything wrong?"  
  
"Prescott will surely get on your case about your commitment to the ideals of reform and true pacifism, and she'll probably insist that you talk with Rorty about where your suspicions are coming from, but - "  
  
"Where they're coming from?! Three people were _killed_ here this summer! And _we're_ all taking the blame for it, when all three deaths occurred under undeniably suspect circumstances! How could we _not_ be suspicious of what we're being told? We're not children, and we're not complete morons." I shook my head and tried to reclaim my cool. "But that's just it. I feel like I don't know whether I should be in serious trouble or not for doing what I did. Have I been deluded about the seriousness of the situation this whole time?"  
  
Onur was giving me his full, sober attention. It was such a relief to have his cool brown eyes looking me over and examining what I'd said from his always level-headed perspective that I felt a swell of gratitude that he was my roommate and that he was nearly twice my age.  
  
"Are you looking for me to talk you down from this, or to legitimate your concerns? Because if you would like to finally realize the seriousness of your situation here, what sorts of opportunities you are squandering, then maybe a bit of panic would do you good."  
  
I huffed a frustrated sigh and shrugged and then stiffened when I abruptly realized we weren't alone. The sounds of the machines had masked his footsteps.  
  
Had masked their footsteps. There were eight of them.  
  
Eddy Koch stood closest to Onur, regarding his former compatriot with wary eyes. The rest were a mix of Romefeller and Mariemaia's followers. None of them had ever tried anything with me in the past. I met the gazes of the men I knew and they stared me down with flat dark eyes, their posture unreadable. Onur looked from me to Eddy and then to the rest of the men who were now surrounding us.  
  
"What is this?" Onur asked Eddy, trusting their old bond to give him a truthful answer.  
  
Eddy looked right at me. "This is business with Chang. You should leave now, pal."  
  
My fingers started to buzz as I clenched them into fists. "Why are you here? Who sent you?" I asked, taking a step toward Eddy, who appeared to be the leader. Onur put a hand on my chest and, oddly, kept himself between me and the former White Fang soldier.  
  
Eddy quirked an eyebrow, looking crazy and scummy as ever. I vividly remembered watching him bend Karl over the table in the library cubicle, but I had known then that it was Karl who had him wrapped around his finger. It was always Karl in control. It had always been Karl.  
  
"He sent you, didn't he. Asked you to bring a few friends. Of the least reputable sort I see, the ones most easily goaded into a fight." I looked around at the men surrounding us. Would they try to pass this one off as faction violence? I barely knew these people, but I suspected they all had one acquaintance in common. "You have a date with him tonight in the library, Eddy?"  
  
My chest hurt, and I could fool myself into thinking it was residual congestion in my lungs, but I knew it was something closer to betrayal.  
  
"Chang..." Onur said in warning.  
  
"I'm serious, Onur," Eddy said in a similar tone. "You better take off now."  
  
"Or what?" my roommate asked, reasonably. "If you intend to hurt him, how could I possibly leave him here? Ordinarily, I wouldn't worry about his ability to defend himself, but this would not be a fair fight."  
  
Eight to two didn't sound much better. I clenched a fist and felt how weak my arms had become during and after my illness. A few weeks from now, I might not have even needed Onur to take care of his half while I laid out the rest, but right now...  
  
I watched them all reach into their uniforms, pulling out switchblades and jackknives. One of them had a rusty fillet knife. "I'm sorry," I said quietly. "They didn't know you would be here. It was just supposed to me, finishing up the laundry shift."  
  
"Don't be an idiot," Onur growled. "We can talk or way through this like adults. Right, Eddy?"  
  
Eddy looked momentarily conflicted, but then one of the Romefeller men, a maniac by the name of Mathis, lunged at me, knife out. I stepped back, ready for this fight, no matter how it turned out, almost glad that it'd come to this instead of an appeal to the Board and more meetings with Winner lawyers.  
  
But then it happened again. Onur put himself between me and the knife, and the sort of thing that changes a person's life forever unfolded in a few inexorable seconds. His big hand closed around Mathis' neck and snapped it, even as the jackknife went into his gut and ripped up, stopping at his ribs. We all stared as Mathis flopped to the ground, instantly lifeless. Then Onur's knees went wobbly, threatening to dump him next to the body. He tried to hold the edges of the wound together, but it wasn't working and I reached for him even as he started to fall. Onur grabbed the knife out of his gut and without a second's hesitation hurled it at the next man in line. It thunked solidly into his chest, right between his ribs, and stupidly, I wished I'd had the chance to see Onur fight in the war. He shook me off as his knees hit the cement and he looked up with wide, dazed eyes.  
  
"Sorry," he grunted. "I threw our weapon away."  
  
"It's okay; I'll get us another one," I said, limbs flooding with familiar adrenalin. I straightened and backed into a defensive stance. "Stay there."  
  
I faced them all with the clear, sure knowledge that this was the end of my time at RCNP. My sentence was ending about ten months early, and as I ducked under the first swipe of a switchblade and away from the quick jab that followed, I was glad there hadn't been time to really think about what that meant for anyone other than myself.  
  
I didn't hold back and it felt good to go straight for the jugular. I hadn't been able to do this in over two years. I crushed Eddy Koch's windpipe first because I still didn't want him touching Karl again and then I spun into a kick that felt like it cracked at least three ribs of the man beside him, a man I had served with in the second war. He staggered back and I followed him and tripped him up, grabbing his arm and slamming him hard enough back onto the ground to crack his skull.  
  
I whirled and leaned back from the fillet knife as it slashed at my throat, dropping my hands to the floor and sweeping the man's legs from under him.  
  
It was a mistake. The second I was down, a hard-soled shoe caught me behind the ear and knocked me to my knees, connecting with my ribs a moment later. I rolled with the hit, sucking in a painful breath, and made it to my feet before anyone exploited the situation further. But one of the four remaining men was directly behind me, in my blind spot, I realized, as blunt pressure that I knew was actually sharp, punched and then twisted into my kidney. I staggered forward and choked on my own spit as I tried to breathe. I just managed to turn away from the fillet knife, but it sliced my ear and cheek before I could back up enough. I felt behind me and my hand closed around the handle of a jackknife, sticking out just above my hip bone. My lower back felt heavy, my legs like they would no longer do what I wanted them to. Still, I managed to grab the wrist of the man with the fillet knife, twisting it for a clean break, then pulling him close to me so that I could snap his neck. I grabbed the knife but not before a quick slice with a switchblade at my right knee severed more than one of the tendons and I went down again. I tried to stay upright, leaning on my left knee, looking up at the three remaining inmates, holding the fillet knife out in front of me, daring them to come at me. They came two at once, one managing to kick the knife out of my hand after I sliced open his calf muscle, the other, at the last second, reversing the grip on his jackknife to slam it against my temple.  
  
The hit drove me down onto the floor where I lay, eye to eye with Onur. The floor was slippery beneath my cheek, wet with our blood. I felt it soaking into my hair and through my shirt. Onur was still breathing but he watched me with eyes that were mostly gone.  
  
We stared at each other until everything went black.


	13. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \----------  
> Warning: A little trippy.

.  
  
.  
  
"...move him when we pull him out of the coma... condition is stable..."  
  
"...should regain... right knee... removed the damaged... very low blood pressure..."  
  
"...okay with only... risk of future...?"  
  
"It's too soon to..."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"...are really uncomfortable. I think my ass is about..."  
  
"Duo, please just shut..."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"...work today?"  
  
"We received a memo concerning clutter on our... don't even drink coffee."  
  
"Did you finish that job for..."  
  
"...ordering parts from East Bumblefuck. They won't come in for another week."  
  
"You'll stay here then until..."  
  
"Yeah, I'll stay."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"I am so sorry. We should have been there."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"BP and pulse normal. Oxygen at 95. Muscle regeneration is still holding and the new tissue appears to be knitting with the..."  
  
"...pretty unbelievable... never seen someone lose so much blood and still... lucky the knife missed the renal..."  
  
"What about the nerves in...said when we spoke the last time."  
  
"We've made every effort to... He's not in any pain."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"He's staying in our building right now; he probably knows something's up."  
  
"...just tell him?"  
  
"If you want to tell..."  
  
"I don't want to tell him."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Because I wouldn't know how to do it. You should... not like we intended to keep it from..."  
  
"Unless Duo asks and makes it his business, we're not obligated to say anything. So, I don't want to tell him either."  
  
"If Chang can hear us now, then he knows."  
  
"Chang is in a coma... hear us. We could fuck on the bed right... wouldn't hear us."  
  
"I don't think we should test that theory."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"Do you think he can hear us now?"  
  
"I don't know. The doctors always encourage talking to coma patients."  
  
"I never heard anything, but then, I don't think anyone ever came to see me."  
  
"You'd been captured, smartass. We couldn't exactly waltz into an OZ hospital and hold your hand."  
  
"I bet you could have."  
  
"My honed infiltration skills were needed elsewhere."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"I think his color looks better than yesterday."  
  
"I think that's still just swelling from all the stitches in his face."  
  
"It's a shame they don't use Regen for surface wounds. That'll scar."  
  
"Yes, but it put his knee back together and knit up his shredded back muscle, so we should be glad our hospital has this facility."  
  
"This may be the ass-end of the continent, but it is the capital, for cryin' out loud..."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"I'll go with you and pick something up for dinner on the way back. Duo, are you hungry?"  
  
"Yeah, you think they got macaroni and cheese?"  
  
"Probably. You want to come?"  
  
"No, I'll stay in case he wakes up."  
  
"Duo, he just got off Regen; the doctor said they wouldn't bring him out of the coma for another twelve hours."  
  
"Hey, he's got our constitution, so he'll be up in an hour, tops, right, buddy? Oh, get me a Coke, would ya?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
.  
  
.  
  
"Hey, Wu, I bet you're hungry even if you don't know it. Haven't had anything in your stomach in a week. I'd give you some of my mac and cheese if you didn't have that big old tube down your throat. The doctor said he'd take it out in a couple hours, but I think it should come out now. Waking up with one of those things is no fun, believe me. It's funny, doctors never believe what our freaky bodies are capable of, do they. They're so surprised every time one of us does something miraculous, like survive losing as many pints of blood as you did. Just a good thing you've got two kidneys, though, pal. There was no saving the one with the jackknife in it. Hope you weren't too attached to it, though of course physiologically, I'm sure it was a very complex relationship. Ha. Well, that's what the other one's for anyway.  
  
"I think Heero's right; you're definitely looking better, even with those railroad tracks in your cheek. That'll make for a mean scar, though; I'm almost jealous. Trowa's got a nice one on his eyebrow. You both look like pirates.  
  
"Sometimes I wish we'd stayed pirates. I mean, not with the raping and pillaging part... but the "no masters, no orders" part; that'd be pretty cool. Instead of rolling over and letting you go to that awful place, we could have just pointed our headlamp toward the horizon and gone somewhere else, run until they weren't chasing us. I would still do that, you know. I'm good at running, Wu.  
  
"Huh. It's nice being able to touch your hair and not have you bite my head off. You remember I always wanted to touch it when we lived together? If it hadn't been so shiny... Plus I figured, if you liked it, maybe you'd reciprocate. No one's touched my hair since I was little, except to yank on it during interrogations, which, I don't have to tell you, isn't the same.  
  
"You know, I'm holding your hand right now, too, and you can't stop me. I wonder if you can even feel it. Squeeze my hand back if you can, okay? Guess I won't hold my breath, though.  
  
"Hey, I'm sorry I couldn't come back to see you after you got over your flu, but they wouldn't let me. I was gonna have to be escorted anywhere I went, and I said 'fuck that.' Figured I'd just sneak in some time when you were on laundry duty again. That worked out pretty well before. Haha, you shoulda seen your face when you saw it was me. I thought you would club me over the head with that paddle for sure.  
  
"You probably don't want to hear about the laundry ever again, do you. I'll wait until you're awake to give you the details, but I got some pretty bad news for ya. I'm really sorry. But you're out of there now. You're in Rome at the best hospital in the country, and you got to ride here in style. I couldn't get in until you'd already been here a few hours, but Une called Heero and Tro right away. Not really sure why she heard so fast. But they were here when you got here, and they said they got to see you before they induced a coma and put you in Regen. They said you looked like death warmed over, paler than me, even after I'd been off-planet for a year. Way to comfort your best friend, right?  
  
"I think I hear the guys coming back now. It's chow time, though I gotta say I'm not too thrilled to be eating hospital food. I'll try and enjoy it for ya.  
  
"We'll stay as late as we can, okay, buddy? And we'll be here when you wake up tomorrow morning."

+

"Get that thing out of him! Get it out; he's choking!"  
  
"Mr. Maxwell, please move aside. The nurse will be here in just a moment."  
  
"You can't take it out?"  
  
"No, I'm the aide, but the nurse has been called."  
  
"I'll do it myself if you won't. Come on, he's gagging on it!"  
  
"There's nothing in his stomach, and he's not even awake yet. It's a reflex. Please calm down."  
  
"Look! He's trying to open his eyes. He's waking up!"  
  
"All right, out of the way, Maxwell. As much as you dislike it, I'm in charge here, so, give me some room while I take the tube out."  
  
Nothing more than blurred images and a distant retching sound, then a firm tugging in my throat.  
  
"We told you he'd wake up sooner than you thought!"  
  
Hands on my shoulders when I curled forward, coughing and heaving. I blinked rapidly and felt a heavy braid on my chest and the shadow of a face very close.  
  
"Hey, buddy, easy now, just lay back and breathe. Breathe through your nose, okay, nice and slow."  
  
The bed started moving and I reached for the side rails by reflex.  
  
"They're just taking you to your own room, Wu, out of intensive care. Just try and sleep, okay? Sleep it off."

+

I woke up thinking I really had to use the bathroom, realized I was already going, panicked, then saw the cath bag at the end of my bed and remembered that there was no such thing as dignity in a hospital.  
  
I'd shoved myself into a sitting position and, after several minutes of breathing and existing and consciousness, I noticed the weakness in my lower back and lowered myself to the pillows again. I counted the number of machines attached to arm, finger, vein, legs, chest, etc. and then cataloged which parts of my body could move freely and which ones couldn't. Aside from needles and tubes, my arms were fine. The right side of my head was a mess of bandages and gauze and I felt stitches in my cheek pull when I opened my mouth. My throat felt utterly raw, like I'd either been throwing up for hours or had a breathing tube recently yanked out. When I tried to move my legs, I felt like I was only partially connected to the lower half of my body. The toes of my right foot wiggled easily, whereas I felt almost no response from my left leg. Somehow, this didn't upset me, and in a detached sort of fog, I wondered if the numbness starting above my left hip and extending downward would be permanent. I wondered if there would be wheelchairs or crutches or, if I were lucky, a cane in my future.  
  
When I moved my right leg again, just to remind myself that I could, I realized that the knee was stiff and when I bent it upwards, it cramped and twitched. When I straightened my leg, the tendons pulled. I couldn't really get upset about this either.  
  
I looked out the window into the nighttime city landscape, recalling from a half-remembered conversation that I was in Rome and no longer at RCNP. The night was lit up street-light orange, and I realized it was the first time I'd seen city blocks and street lights in over two years. I tried to remember more of that conversation, but all I could recall was the sound of voices with periods of dead silence in between. I had no idea how long I'd been out.  
  
In the reflection of the glass, a shadowy figure entered my room, and I turned, thinking it was a nurse. I opened my mouth to ask for some ice cream, feeling a little hungry, and froze when I found Karl standing at the foot of my bed, holding out a Preventers badge like it was the snack I'd been about to request, and grinning at me, looking immensely pleased with himself.  
  
I stared at him and couldn't panic. I could only look at him watching me, thinking that I should ask him a few questions, the two most important ones being 'Did you tell Eddy Koch to kill me?' and 'What are you doing here?' Instead I noticed things like the shine of sweat on his face, the way his hair hung limp and dirty in his face, and his clothes. He wasn't wearing a uniform. They were civilian clothes.  
  
I sucked in a breath to try to ask him something, anything, but then I heard the night nurse speaking to a patient in the next room over and when I blinked and returned my focus to Karl, he'd disappeared like he was never there at all.  
  
I focused on breathing and being awake and alive and wondered how long this numbness would last.

+

I woke up in the night, thankfully disconnected from all the machines except the morphine drip in my arm. I looked out the window and saw that it was raining, and that someone was sitting in a chair, their face turned away from me, watching the drops track down the glass. With that posture and the brightness of his white-blond hair, it could only be Quatre. The impossibility of it didn't seem to matter - I knew it was Quatre. I sat up in bed.  
  
"What are you doing here?"  
  
He didn't turn to look at me. "I wanted to make sure you were okay. You gave us quite a scare."  
  
"It's fine. I'll be fine. How are you?"  
  
He turned away from the window and leaned his elbows on his knees. He wore a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons of the collar undone. His hair was a bit longer than I remembered, but it was still thick and shiny, hanging in his eyes a little.  
  
"I'm worried about you, what's going to happen to you now. And afterward."  
  
After she died, I saw Meiran in times of severe stress to my mind and body - most notably when I was captured and held by OZ during the first war for interrogation concerning the whereabouts of the Doctors. The drugs they gave me brought her out in watercolors, with a pink haze coming off her shoulders. She didn't say much, but stood behind my interrogators and it felt like when we were children, before we were married. She was always ready to laugh at me for whatever I did. I watched her instead of paying attention to the ways in which OZ was trying to break into my head. And on the Lunar Base, when the oxygen was about to run out, she sat beside me when we looked at the specs for our new Gundam.  
  
So, it wasn't surprising that now, while my body was adjusting to regenerated muscle tissue and while scar tissue formed over the wounds, Quatre would be here. "Is there something you know that I don't?" I asked.  
  
He shrugged and smiled, close-lipped. I waited and he looked down at his hands. "I've missed you."  
  
Since I'd woken up, everything I'd felt and thought had been diluted and bland. But I recognized this thing right here as real longing. "I've missed you, too."  
  
"You have to be so careful now, Wufei."  
  
I looked at him strangely as he stood up and took a few steps toward me. He was so familiar in that moment - clean and neat and calm, confident and smiling - that I reached my hand out to him, wanting to touch him, wanting the feel of crisp cotton in my hand to be as real as it looked. The sight of three broken teeth in the corner of his mouth was like the sound of something tearing.  
  
He came a step closer and he was still Quatre, but he was Karl, too. I made a strange sound - half shout, half sob - and fumbled my way out of bed, unsteady feet barely holding me upright. Karl watched me struggle and took a step back, beckoning with one hand. "You can do it," he said.  
  
Another wordless shout and I threw myself at him, my knee and back giving out all at once and dropping me to the chilly tile floor. I gasped at a sharp pain in my arm as the IV almost tore free of the adhesive and pressed my hand over it, trying get the needle straight inside the vein. When I looked up, Karl was gone. I leaned back against the bed and counted to ten before calling the nurse.

+

I woke up and wasn't surprised to see him this time, dressed in plain dark clothes and holding a folder in one hand against his thigh. "What now?" I asked, resting against the pillows and wishing fervently that the state would pay for other painkillers for convicts besides morphine. While morphine always worked to dull the pain, it carried with it such side effects as Karl Hallucinations. "I don't want to see you ever again. You're trying to ruin my life. You tried to get me killed, and you may yet succeed at it."  
  
"I take it you're feeling better," he said, pushing off the wall and taking a few steps closer. I sat up and pushed myself back against the pillows, surreptitiously looking for something I could use for a weapon just in case this Karl Hallucination felt realer than the others who'd visited since I'd woken up.  
  
"Not really," I muttered. "My back is killing me."  
  
"You seem a bit sharper than before."  
  
"You surprised me before." He now stood at the foot of the bed, tapping the folder against my chart hanging by a plastic hook. I wondered if he was going to read it to see exactly what damage he'd done. "Okay, what's in the folder?"  
  
"This?" He looked down and grinned at it. "You're going to be very busy now that you're out. This is something for you to work on."  
  
"What do you mean 'out?'" My hand closed around the TV remote. It was the heaviest thing I could find. "I still have ten months left on my sentence."  
  
Karl raised an eyebrow. "You really think you're going back?"  
  
I hated conversations that didn't make sense. I hadn't had a conversation that went from one logical step to the next in... I couldn't remember the last time. "Once again, do you know something I don't? Last time I checked, they don't let criminals go free just because they're injured. I might get protective custody or I might end up back in my cell with Onur. I most certainly will not be free to go."  
  
"Chang, I know lots of things you don't, but since we don't have a lot of time and since you don't want to talk to me - "  
  
"Your fuck buddies tried to kill me," I interrupted, fighting with myself to get angry. I wanted so badly to be angry with him, but hadn't been able to pull it together enough to feel it since he visited. "My roommate's not in this hospital anywhere, and as soon as I talk to Prescott, I'm pretty sure she'll tell me he's dead. If you were real and I could walk, I would break your neck."  
  
"...I thought we'd get right to the point," he continued, after pausing for only a moment to be sure I was finished threatening him. I gritted my teeth and stayed quiet. He opened the folder and looked inside. "What I have here is our list, along with what Duo's been able to find. And..." He glanced up at me. "He's certainly been busy since you asked him to look into our case. He's got a good list of dead war vets here that he thinks could be connected to Benji, Vasil, and maybe Quatre Winner."  
  
"What about Basker and O'Malley?" I sneered. "You know, the ones who were strangled to death and slashed up afterward?"  
  
He shrugged. "You were right; they didn't really fit, so I didn't include them here."  
  
He didn't look in the least bit ruffled, even though he was guilty as sin.  
  
"Anyway, Duo's got the names and addresses of living relatives and former employers. He's even marked a few that he contacted. This is where you should pick up, Chang, when you get out of here - head to space and follow up on these people. Get their story; figure out what they were involved in when they died; learn who they were talking to."  
  
I realized my mouth was hanging open and closed it. "Let me see that folder," I snapped. "Where did you get it? How do you know what Duo's done for us? For me," I corrected.  
  
He handed it to me and smiled that strange, small smile he used to give only when we were alone and he was on a relatively even keel, usually after he'd slept. And even through the painkiller haze, it gave me a hard twinge, and he saw it. He looked away quickly like he didn't want me to know he'd seen it. I didn't look inside the folder and waited for him to answer me.  
  
"Magic," he finally said. "Magic that didn't hurt anybody," he added, looking a little regretful. He sat down on the edge of the bed and it felt like we were back in his cell, planning a secret meeting at the picnic table. It felt like nothing at all had happened, like he could be on his way out of my cell after a quick hand job by the sink. Stupid and adolescent.  
  
I looked down at the folder in my lap. "Talking to these contacts will alert whoever was responsible for the deaths of those vets, and they'll go to ground. We'll never find them."  
  
Karl's eyes lit up. "Oh no, they won't go to ground, because you and Duo are the ones who'll be doing the looking. What better way to flush out the ones killing war leaders than to have two former Gundam pilots, two of the biggest targets, spearheading the investigation?"  
  
I felt a little sick then. Since I was imagining him and everything he was saying, I must have thought this myself at some point, which meant I'd been willing to put myself and Duo right in the thick of it from the very beginning.  
  
"I don't want to look at this," I said, handing the folder back to him. "First off, it's not real. Second, you tried to kill me, so I have every reason to believe that any so-called efforts to help me now, even if they are figments of my imagination, are further attempts to set me up. And on that note, please get the fuck out." My voice ended a little ragged, and it was easy to blame it on fatigue and the restless confusion that always came with too much time on pain meds.  
  
I hadn't realized that I'd squeezed my eyes shut, but when I opened them, he was gone. I released the TV remote when I felt the ache in my fingers from holding it so tightly. I lay awake staring at the digital clock by the bed, trying to reassure myself that time and space still worked the way they were supposed to.


	14. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \-----------  
> Warnings: None really, for this chapter, except *drum roll* more plotty intrigue!!

I hear the cogs all slipping at the same time,   
and then I see you walk in through the door.   
And it's gonna be, just you and me today,   
waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay.  
_\- "The Alphonse Mambo" Mountain Goats_  
  
And finally, the needle was out of my arm. The patched up hole in my back hurt worse without the morphine, but my head was a whole lot clearer and Karl didn't come back. Duo came to the hospital the next day, and it was the first time I was really able to speak to him, even though I knew he'd been here nearly every day since I was admitted. We hadn't openly acknowledged what had almost happened, what, I'd been informed by the doctor, had been one of the closest calls he'd ever seen.  
  
And we wouldn't acknowledge it, either, because Duo had lived and breathed close calls all his life. We all had, and so we wouldn't talk about this one because talking about it made it into a bigger deal than all the others.  
  
He was the most presentable I'd seen him in years - probably since he'd picked me up from holding after the second war and we'd both been on our best behavior. His jeans looked new and a little stiff, and the white t-shirt he wore didn't have any visible grease or coffee stains. His black zip-up sweatshirt didn't have the holes in the cuffs where he liked to poke his thumbs through. His fingernails were clean and it looked like he'd just scrubbed his face. His hair was a bit disheveled, probably from driving with the window down, but it, too, was clean.  
  
"What's your story?" I asked from where I sat, propped up in bed. I sipped ice water through a straw and watched him smooth his hand over the t-shirt, then tug on the sleeves of the sweatshirt, no doubt looking for thumb holes.  
  
"Trowa said I should quit looking like a terrorist when I visit. I gotta get through your security detail; I might as well try and look trustworthy."  
  
"I haven't even seen them out there since I've been awake; are they scary? And you didn't look like a terrorist; you looked like a laborer."  
  
He flashed me a quick smile. "One and the same, my friend. And, nah, they're not that scary. But they've been warned about me. Your lady-friend, leash-holder, what's-her-name I'm sure told them I'd be stopping by."  
  
"I haven't figured out yet whether they're supposed to keep me from escaping or keep me safe from thugs who've somehow managed to get up here from RCNP." Morphine-induced Karls didn't count, so I didn't mention them.  
  
Duo cringed and sat down in the chair by the bed. "Let's not talk about that yet; let's talk about happy things for a few minutes, okay? I haven't even had the chance to really say, 'Hey, buddy, I'm glad you're alive!'"  
  
I snorted a laugh small enough that it wouldn't irritate my sore back, knee or head. "Yeah, well, now you have, Maxwell. Let's not get stuck on pleasantries." I scratched at the bandages that padded my temple. "What happy things are there to talk about?" A boot to the ear, the butt of a jackknife to the temple, a fillet knife slice to top it all off, and the right side of my face looked like a demilitarized zone. "And I haven't been able to talk to anyone about anything real since I've been here."  
  
"Hey, Wu," Duo started, brow dipping down in frown. "You've been doped up to your eyeballs to cope with all the new muscle they had to put in you, because in case you don't remember - and maybe you don't - you had a huge fucking hole in your back when you got here. You haven't been _around_ to talk to. And before that, the last time I saw you, your brain was cooking itself with a fever I could feel from across the room. So don't complain to me about not bein' able to talk to anybody. You haven't been awake for most of it. I have."  
  
He gave me a good glare and I tried to give one back, but he was right. "I'm awake now. Alert, alive, mobile. I can get to the bathroom on my own with crutches." It was a sort of peace offering, and he took it as such.  
  
He looked impressed, his frustrated words already behind him. "Damn, they let you have crutches already?" Then he looked sly. "Chang, have you been charming the nursing staff?"  
  
I snorted and rolled my eyes.  
  
"No, more likely, you've been terrorizing them," he laughed, then looked toward the door. "Hey, I know. You wanna go for a walk? I mean a ride? I'll drive."  
  
I looked toward the door, too. "They won't let us go far."  
  
Duo shrugged. "S'fine. Just need to get you outta this room for a bit."  
  
I nodded. "That would be nice."  
  
"Good. I'll be right back," he said with a wide grin, pushing himself back up out of his seat. I heard a quick conversation with the guards and then he was back, proudly pushing a wheelchair in front of him.  
  
I shoved the covers back and got out of bed, glad to be wearing scrubs instead of a drafty hospital gown for a ride around the floor. I wasn't surprised when Duo whistled at me.  
  
"Heero definitely knows your colors. Lavender and turquoise really bring out the highlights in your hair, or your skin tone, or something."  
  
I snorted a laugh, leaning back against the bed to stay upright. "My nurse wouldn't shut up about him, actually. She said he went to the laundry room himself to find ones that fit." I looked down at them and winced. "And I think they were for the pediatric ward."  
  
"Well, you are kinda tiny these days," he said, eyes catching on my wrists and collar bone.  
  
"And apparently, Trowa charmed the nurse into arranging this single room for me, too," I continued, entirely ignoring Duo's comment. "She told me they were nicer, more efficient patient advocates than the ones actually working for the hospital, which doesn't seem possible in Heero's case, but Trowa can be whoever he wants to be, when the need arises."  
  
Duo nodded, suddenly looking a bit morose, and pushed the wheelchair forward like an apology. I knew that he'd done what he could, too, though, without a badge and with a reputation for trouble, he got away with less. So far as I knew, he'd been here the most, sitting by the bed with his feet propped up on an extra chair, flipping through the channels pretty much every time I woke up during daylight. Looking at him now, I could tell he wanted me to assure him that it'd been enough.  
  
"And she definitely enjoyed embarrassing me over 'just how much your friends must care about you.'" I pitched my voice lower, doing my best impression of a middle-aged woman who'd been smoking for at least twenty years, despite working in the health profession.  
  
My horrible impersonation startled a strange look and then a laugh out of him and he appeared to bounce back again to his initial enthusiasm for our walk. Grateful that no one else had been around to see it, I waved away the arm he offered to help me into the chair and lowered myself into it, flipping down the little footrests as he rolled me out the door.  
  
I could get around all right on my own with crutches and would be doing even better once physical therapy started. The rehabilitation time for regenerated muscle wasn't a lengthy one and I itched to get on with it. The doctor said Monday would be the day - whenever that was.  
  
"What day is it?"  
  
"Friday."  
  
I glanced over my shoulder and over the handles of the wheel chair to see that guards were following us at a relatively respectful distance. "Where are Heero and Trowa? At work?"  
  
"Yeah, they'll be by tonight. It's the weekend, so if you want, we can stay late to keep you company."  
  
I shook my head and turned away. "Even though I've been in a coma for a week, and in a morphine haze for days afterward, I feel like I could sleep days more. What are you doing here now, anyway? Shouldn't you be at work? You didn't take off did you?"  
  
Duo snorted softly as we rounded a corner. "Ordinarily, I would be up in arms and calling you an ungrateful little shit, but oddly enough, you're right this time. I'd rather be home working on your case than hanging out here or with Kathy - who's a peach, of course, but watching soaps and dicking around the city waiting for you to wake up really isn't what I should be doing with my time."  
  
"Then why are you here?" I turned around again to look at him.  
  
"Because Sam kicked me out and told me to come up to the hospital to be with you."  
  
I flushed and quickly looked forward.  
  
"I didn't bring my laptop, 'cause there's not a lotta privacy in Tro's apartment," he continued, "and I wouldn't want them snooping around on it. And either of them would, too, in a second if they got the chance."  
  
"Really?"  
  
"Oh yeah - Trowa, 'cause he's a busybody and Heero, because he can't _not_ touch a computer when he finds one."  
  
"Well..." Now was the time to say what I'd been meaning to tell him since I'd woken up. "Duo, I think maybe you should leave the case where it is - I mean, not go back to it when you get home again." Duo said nothing, but the silence was chilly. "I can handle it on my own, and after this, Prescott will be wanting to speak with me, so I can clear the whole thing up without you getting involved." I clenched my teeth and looked straight ahead, then grabbed hold of the seat when the chair swerved behind a few potted palms. I kept my face blank as Duo knelt in front of me, his clenched fists resting on my knees.  
  
"Why can't you just be normal for one minute in your goddamn life, Chang?" he hissed. "Why can't you take a second to recognize what happened to you, and have a normal reaction? Be scared and angry and sad. Be _normal_. Realize that you almost died, that you lost a ton of blood and a major _organ_ , and that... that your roommate has been dead now for over a week _._ "  
  
I closed my eyes and felt my lips pinch together. My throat ached.  
  
"Wufei, Onur _died_. He was dead when they found you. Une said he bled to death before anyone could get to him. The only reason you lived was because that knife was plugging up the wound and they were able to get some blood in you before you were flown here. I'm _so_ sorry to tell you. He was your friend and I trusted him to look out for you, and - "  
  
"He did," I said hoarsely. I opened my eyes to see Duo looking up at me, sober and scared. "He took a knife in the gut that was meant for me. The doctor... the nurses... when I asked them where he was in the hospital, they didn't know who I was talking about. They didn't know anything about him."  
  
"He didn't make it here, Wu. He's dead. And you were going to be. They don't know how long you both lay there, but Onur had been dead for maybe twenty minutes. So think about that - _realize_ what fucking _happened_ to you - instead of saying something asinine which you know I'll ignore."  
  
I realized I was chewing the inside of my lip and that I'd just broken the skin. I sucked out the taste of metal and looked away from him. "How did Une know everything that happened to me quickly enough to alert Trowa and Heero, to have them waiting for me when I got here? How - how did she know how long Onur was dead before someone found us?"  
  
From the corner of my eye, I saw him shrug. "Guess she and Prescott are closer friends than we thought. But Une was practically your legal guardian until you turned eighteen, so I can't say I'm surprised." He shook his head abruptly. "But that's not the point; the _point_ is - "  
  
"No, Duo, that's exactly the point," I hissed, keeping my voice low and firmly pushing back the image of Onur, gutted on the floor - a dead body next to my dying body. Neither Duo nor I could afford to be distracted by that image, as much as Onur deserved to be mourned. There would be time for that. All of tonight loomed ahead of me without him, knowing that if or when I returned to RCNP, he wouldn't be there waiting for me with all the homework I'd missed. "If Prescott tells Une everything, and Une knows everything about me, and about what I've done, what _we've_ done, then you and I are in enough shit to sure as hell keep me out of Preventers and maybe - "  
  
"Wait; _what?_ " Duo half-pleaded, half-whined. "What the hell are you talking about, 'knows what you've done?' You haven't done anything! Eight guys tried to _kill_ you."  
  
I finally met his eyes again and he flinched back an inch. I realized I must have looked as haggard as him and took a few deep breaths. "They were ordered to; I know they were. The leader, this asshole Eddy Koch; he was Karl's..." By reflex, my lip curled. "They were involved before, and I think the rest of the guys were, too, and I think that Karl told them to - "  
  
Duo was shaking his head, one hand unintentionally squeezing my injured knee hard enough that I winced. "No, no, no, no, do _not_ tell me that little creep was involved in this somehow."  
  
I gave him a dismal nod and he hung his head, releasing my knee. "I overheard him talking to an officer that he'd also been involved with, someone I thought he hated, telling him exactly what to tell Prescott about me, everything Karl and I had speculated about concerning Benji and Vasil, who we thought might actually be responsible for their deaths, who we thought might fit the profile to be next."  
  
I leaned forward in the chair and rested my hand on his shoulder until he looked up at me, his face drawn in a worried frown. "But he didn't mention you, Duo. He didn't say anything about your involvement. So, maybe Prescott doesn't know about you; maybe Une doesn't know. Maybe he was just after me and not you. If you go home and get rid of all the names of those dead vets, their friends and employers - all of it - then maybe, even if he does give your name to Prescott and to Une, you can deny you were involved. If there's no evidence, then it's just - "  
  
"Wufei," he said softly, resolutely. "Let's not panic here, okay? This is not the place to do it."  
  
I huffed a quiet, bitter laugh. "There may not _be_ another place to do it."  
  
He smiled sourly. "And let's not be too dramatic, either. You said yourself it was all speculation, right? Everything you and Karl were working on - all you could do was speculate. That's 'no harm, no foul' in my book."  
  
I shook my head. "That's what I thought. That's what Onur thought. So why did eight guys, all connected to Karl, attack me two days after I overheard Karl talking with Brandt?"  
  
"You don't _know_ that Karl was the one to sic them on you. Even though I never trusted that little prick, you shouldn't just assume he was behind the attempt on your life."  
  
"So, it was just a coincidence? Come on, Duo," I snapped, clenching my jaw when I realized I'd said that louder than I'd meant to.  
  
He made a small, frustrated noise through his nose. "I don't know, Wu. I wasn't there." He stood up and pressed his hands into his lower back. I followed him with my eyes, wishing I could stand up and do a little pacing of my own.  
  
"So, Une didn't mention any of that?" I pressed. "Didn't say anything to Heero or Trowa about Karl? If Prescott tells her everything, you'd think she'd tell Une that her future Preventer and his ex-terrorist, freelance Preventer friend suspect the New Pacifist administration of conspiring to kill war leaders."  
  
"Maybe, but that's not something Une would tell Heero or Trowa," he said, and of course, he was right.  
  
I took a deep breath. "You should lay low with Sam for awhile. It'd probably be better for you to get off-planet and stay with Howard, but leaving now would be too suspicious. Ditch the laptop and keep up to your elbows in engine grease and stay away from me and maybe - "  
  
He whirled back around. " _Why_ did you trust him?" he hissed. I blinked and tried not to get flustered enough to blush. "I knew from the _second_ I saw him that he was workin' you."  
  
It was easier to get offended. "How, Duo - how did you recognize something like that?"  
  
And that cornered him. He wrapped his arms around himself and put on one of his favorite faces - that of breezy, worldly experience, the 'I've seen it all and I'm not scared' face. "I saw the way he looked at you, and I'd know that look anywhere. He saw you for exactly what you were, and he knew he could bring you down by making the right people suspicious. You were always on thin ice at that place. He's ex-OZ right? A Treize zealot? It's not rocket science, Wufei."  
  
It wasn't that simple, I knew. Karl wasn't in it for revenge, and if he were, I wouldn't be the target. I hadn't betrayed Treize's ideals even though I'd been the one to kill him, and Karl knew that. I was more sure of it than I was about any other part of this mess. Karl did what he did for himself, for his own gain, not for revenge. All I had to do was figure out what he had to gain from making trouble for me, what he had to gain from my death, or my near-fatal injury. None of the hits I'd taken were killing blows, or at least they hadn't ended up that way, so maybe...  
  
My head was starting to ache with the maddening ambiguity of it all and Duo was barely keeping it together behind that mask of his. I met his troubled gaze for a few seconds to essentially convey the amount of shit we'd landed ourselves in, and finally, he nodded, as though we'd decided something.  
  
"Okay."  
  
"I think you should take me back to my room now."  
  
"Yeah, me too."  
  
Before we left the relative privacy of the potted palms, he rested his hand on the back of my neck and pressed his his forehead to mine, just below the bandages. I closed my eyes and held my breath. "Sit tight and don't tell them anything unless you're sure it's gonna help you outta this mess. I'll be back in a couple days to make sure you're okay. Tell Trowa and Heero that, until I call them, one of them has to be here with you every day."  
  
He leaned away slightly and I opened my eyes, scowling up at him, and somehow, his proximity wasn't as unnerving as it could sometimes be. It felt like we were strategizing, preparing for something, and in those circumstances, his closeness felt warranted.  
  
Which was stupid, because there was nothing I could do, no way I could prepare for what would happen to us, and wherever he was going, unless it was to contact my lawyer and wipe his laptop - which I doubted - it probably wouldn't solve anything.  
  
"Don't be ridiculous; I don't need them here every day. And where are you going? How long will you be gone?"  
  
He straightened and the height difference between us right then was infuriating. "Not long," he said, ignoring the first question entirely. "Let's go, okay? You hungry? I can get you something from the cafeteria. Their mac and cheese isn't bad."  
  
"No, just take me back."  
  
"Sure, buddy."

+

I heard Prescott's heels on the tile floor and sat up straighter on the bed. She snapped a greeting to the guards in the hall and then she walked right into my room without so much as a knock. She stood at the foot of my bed; a few seconds later, Rorty followed at a more sedate pace, smiling a wane greeting and clearly waiting for Prescott to lead the way.  
  
She looked me up and down, her hair and clothes as immaculate as ever, and I thought that maybe she and Une had even gone to the same finishing school. "You look like hell," she snapped. I resisted the urge to touch the stitches in my cheek. They'd taken the bandages off my ear and temple yesterday and I knew that my hair hung awkwardly over the places they'd had to shave.  
  
"Well, I feel pretty good, considering. Thank you for authorizing muscle regeneration. I probably wouldn't be able to - "  
  
She waved a dismissing hand and behind her, Rorty gave her an admonishing look. It was no secret that they didn't see eye to eye when it came to dealing with us. "Don't play the part of the grateful inmate; I've never been convinced by that act since I met you."  
  
I scowled. "I am grateful. You didn't have to do it. You could have left me a cripple, and, honestly, I'm surprised you didn't."  
  
"All right, all right," Rorty intervened, stepping forward. "Let's not be hostile, here. Chang, Francesca and I are both glad you're alive and safe and recovering. Right?" She gave a stiff nod and I returned it. "We didn't come here to express our distress over what's happened; we came to address the situation."  
  
Prescott gave another stiff nod and straightened her already perfect suit, looking a little flustered. "We won't beat around the bush, Mr. Chang. It has been made painfully obvious that you're no longer safe at RCNP. Just before you and Onur Alakus were attacked, Karl Bergsen approached me with concerns about your safety."  
  
I sat perfectly still on the bed, feeling the inevitability of this conversation begin to fray around the edges. What she was saying wasn't quite right.  
  
"He informed me he had reason to believe that your identity as a Gundam pilot during the first war had been leaked and that it was widely known who you were, and of greater concern, what you'd done."  
  
What she was saying really didn't sound right. On some level, it certainly sounded logical, but not... not after what I had heard from Karl, not after what I'd been _sure_ he was capable of.  
  
"It is not our job to punish you for what you did during the wars; it is our job to educate and train you to be a good citizen, and despite these recent events, it is still our intention to complete that task. I intend to see you make a full recovery and finish the program at RCNP." She took a deep breath and smiled thinly. "You'd be a waste of state money otherwise."  
  
Rorty rolled his eyes. "We're here to work out an alternate solution, Chang - one that will keep you safe and allow you to stay in our custody for the remainder of your sentence."  
  
I remembered to nod at what they were saying, while glancing quickly down at my arm to be sure that I didn't still have intravenous pain meds messing with my head. I kept my mouth shut against everything that threatened to spill out of it, first and loudest being, "Are you _serious_?" By then, however, talks of my future were well under way and it was all I could do to keep up.


	15. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \-----------  
> Warnings: None for this one - except I get nerdy about a couple things, namely some medical and martial arts stuff.
> 
> Notes: THANK YOU kinsugifor helping me figure out Wufei's martial arts style!  
> Also, this chap. takes place about a week after the last one.

Big bus headed southeast from the courthouse   
But I'm not headed southeast from the courthouse   
Let some mysterious chunk of space debris   
Puncture the roof and set me free  
_\- "Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of" Mountain Goats_  
  
_Yang_ style _t'ai chi_ , especially the short form, wasn't a particularly strenuous form of exercise, nor was it overly complicated, but it did take a considerable amount of concentration to do properly. More than that, it took years of practice to achieve synthesis of mind and body, to make it both martial art and meditation. Watching Heero in the wall-size mirror of the physical therapy unit as he copied my steps, I could see that he knew the forms, but not their meaning. He followed me and simultaneously watched the way my torso twisted and my knee bent and extended. He watched for signs of discomfort or a sign that I was tiring. The physical therapist watched as well from the sidelines, bemused -- as most health professionals tended to be around us -- and taking the occasional note on a few of the steps. I mostly ignored her and focused on controlling the movement of the new muscle and tendon in my body, trying to get it to feel like it belonged to me.  
  
It was interesting to watch Heero's body move when he wasn't trying to pin me flat on my back. His bare feet really weren't all that big, but they kept him so firmly rooted to the ground that they seemed somehow heavier and broader. He moved with the easy confidence of someone utterly at home in his own skin. Even though he'd only learned these forms two short weeks ago in anticipation of helping me train my back and legs to work again, he pivoted and stretched and shifted his weight as if he'd known them for much longer. Only people who knew their bodies could move like that.  
  
I was willing to admit that Heero had the sort of body worth maintaining. Watching his meticulous attention to how we both moved -- pushing with relaxed palms, leaning his weight on his back leg, rocking forward onto his other leg, bending forward over it, fingers angled in an open fist -- helped take my mind off the trembling muscles in my back and my knee which threatened to dump me onto the mat.  
  
The short form worked all the right muscles for me, but even better, it helped restore my balance, forcing me to trust both my left and right legs to hold me up on their own. And it showed me that I was in no way ready for my family's C _hen_ style, which combined soft and hard, slow and quick movements that would have devastated my back. I imagined that it was a style Heero would have felt closer to, though he certainly wouldn't have been able to pick up even the basics in two weeks.  
  
He had done a lot to make sure that I was well looked after and comfortable at the hospital. The effort he had made spoke volumes without him having to say a word to me about it, which, honestly, was why Heero and I got along so well. In this situation, however, where muscle control, breathing, flexibility, and endurance focused our time together, Heero was as stubborn as he'd ever been during the wars. He wouldn't give an inch, and despite the difficulty of maintaining the forms and moving fluidly through them, I wouldn't have wanted it to be any different. Finding me hospital scrubs and bringing spare sweatpants and t-shirts was one thing; coddling during training was something else entirely.  
  
After this, I had fifteen minutes of vigorous stretches to look forward to, with Heero literally pushing and pulling my body to its limits. The physical therapist would watch us then, too, and have to admit that, when it came to the human body, Heero knew what he was about. He knew what my body could handle because he knew how injuries worked, as well as how quickly Gundam pilots' bodies recovered from them. Despite this assurance that I wouldn't hurt myself when working with him, I spent a considerable portion of the stretching exercises plotting ways to get back at him in a similar fashion, ideally when I was again his equal in physical strength.  
  
However, even as exhausting as this was, the fact that I could do it at all -- coupled with all the coiled energy I could see building in Heero's limbs -- made me itch for a time when we could forgo sequences of forms and go at it for real. Heero wasn't built for exercises that cultivated and increased energy; he had more than enough of that already. I met Heero's eyes in the mirror and knew he was thinking the same thing.  
  
It was a simple friendship, and unlike others, didn't require much to keep us entertained.  
  
"When do we get to do this facing each other, without a guard waiting outside the door?" he asked, the smile on his lips incongruous with the fluid movements of his arms. One didn't generally look eager when doing _t'ai chi_.   
  
I held the proper posture and stance but looked off to middle distance. "Same as before, Yuy -- ten months."  
  
Heero stopped and held his pose, weight on his back leg, the toes of his other foot just touching the mat.  
  
"Lower your elbows, Yuy; your arms aren't wings."  
  
A growl rumbled in his chest, but he relaxed his arms into the proper position. We stepped our feet together and then shifted to the side, open palms pushing in the same direction.  
  
"You spoke with Prescott, then?" he prodded, when I didn't volunteer any new information.  
  
I nodded and, by silent agreement, we ended the sequence, folding our hands and turning to bow to each other. I succeeded in lowering myself to the mat without shaking and then lay back, stretching my arms over my head. "We spoke last week. I'm surprised Une didn't give you the update herself since she seems to know what Prescott is up to before I do."  
  
Heero knelt beside me, ready to help/torture with flexibility exercises. "I haven't spoken to her at length recently." We both knew it was because he'd been taking time off to come here. I drew my left knee up to my chest, and Heero pounced like he'd been waiting to do this all day. He pressed his hand to the back of my leg and leaned what felt like his whole weight on it. For a few seconds it felt really good on my lower back, stretching the new muscle and reducing the stress on other muscle groups that had been compensating for the weaker ones. It stopped feeling good as soon as the stretch felt more like work, and Heero let up when he saw the strain in my face. "Do you want to tell me what Prescott told you will happen now that they recognize you're no longer safe with them?"  
  
We switched to my right leg, which was a more delicate operation. Instead of pushing my knee right into my nose, Heero pushed my leg up to a ninety degree angle and then held it there, pressing at both my ankle and thigh, urging the knee to extend as far as it could. "Not really," I said through clenched teeth. "But it'd be rude not to. Is Trowa coming by today? I'd just as soon tell both of you together so I don't have to repeat myself."  
  
Heero nodded, understanding that impulse thoroughly. "He'll be in by the time we're finished here." He let go of my leg and I folded both down against my chest, clasping my hands together around them. Then I rolled upright and Heero shifted to sit across from me, laying his legs flat and then spreading them wide. I did the same and scooted forward until our heels touched.  
  
"Have you heard from Duo?" I asked, annoyed with myself and the question the second it was out of my mouth. I leaned forward and Heero took hold of my wrists. Then I had to focus on breathing properly as he tried to bend me in half.  
  
"No, we haven't." And he didn't sound too pleased about that either. "He left Cathy and Trowa's apartment a week ago and told her not to worry and to not let us worry either. That was the only communication we had with him." He released the pressure on my wrists and I straightened with a small sigh of relief before leaning back and tugging him forward. He grunted in surprise and then pressed his forehead nearly to the floor without another sound.  
  
I scowled at the top of his head and vowed that I would be able to do that again myself within another week. Maybe two. "He's not going to like what I have to tell him."  
  
I leaned forward again so that he could sit up. "Why not?"  
  
I gave a short, uncomfortable shrug. "Because he's not as good at following the rules as you two."  
  
Heero looked like he was thinking about being affronted and then returned the shrug. "For a long time, the rules didn't apply to us. I think Duo still wants it to be that way. I think it's why he takes off like this sometimes, to do things his own way before anyone can try to tell him otherwise." I nodded because what he said made sense. Then he pulled on my wrists again and I exhaled into a slightly lower position than before.

+

I refused the offer of a wheelchair for the trek back to my room and I made it the whole way without limping, a cold sweat on my upper lip and temples the only evidence of any discomfort.  
  
Safely back and in my own bathroom, I hoisted myself up to sit on the sink counter before I collapsed, bending forward to stretch out the muscle and to reach for the vitamin E cream on the back of the toilet. Scooping out a bunch of it, I slathered it all over the new scar, and twisted around to get a look at it in the mirror. It was still livid and red, but more than marking where a jackknife had stabbed my kidney, it hid all the real work that had been done underneath the skin. The knife had missed the renal artery, which was the only reason I was still alive. As it was, the organ had already failed by the time I was flown to the hospital, my body coping and rerouting urinary tract function to the right kidney -- just as if I'd lost a lung, the other would take over oxygenating my blood. Thankfully, these processes did not require conscious thought for them to work.  
  
Like my back, the scar on the back of my knee marked a surgical site, underneath which tendon had been regrown and knit to muscle and bone. The Regen process itself took many days of eight-hour sessions spent under a carefully monitored combination of UV rays that encouraged rapid cell growth. The way I understood it, they'd put a kind of controlled cancer into my muscles. The new cells were all mine but I had to train them to be like normal muscle and tendon. On the surface, it was scary as hell because no one wants cells that behave abnormally in their bodies, but the payoff was huge. I was already on my feet and able to do up to 30 minutes of light exercise. That would only improve over the next two weeks, by the end of which, I could expect to be able to get around easily and to do most of the things I'd done before.  
  
It would take considerably longer to make up for all the muscle mass I'd lost over the last four weeks. This most recent incident, coupled with my illness from two weeks ago, had sapped a lot of my strength, along with a distressing amount of weight. Duo had expressed his concern discreetly, by his standards, commenting "you're pretty tiny these days" a week ago; Heero had taken it upon himself to train with me until he was satisfied I was strong enough, and Trowa, unsurprisingly, had started slipping me protein bars on his visits. They tasted terrible and reminded me of the ration bars we'd had to resort to on occasion during the wars, but I was grateful. The doctor was confident I'd make a full recovery with only a few more scars to show for the whole ordeal.  
  
Without the Regeneration Unit, none of that would have been even remotely possible. Without it, I was looking at six to eight weeks recovery time, and then at least a year of painful therapy to regain the use of my legs and back. Without it, I'd have been crippled, maybe permanently. Most people who received a similar injury would not have had the option of anything else, as Regen was still new, expensive and controversial.  
  
"Somebody must still like me," I muttered, sliding off the sink and pulling off the scrubs to put cream on the back of my knee. Prescott had authorized the time in the Regen Unit, which meant she pretty much had to be that 'somebody.' And that, I had been realizing over the past few days, posed a long list of very difficult questions regarding the assumptions I'd made about her and her intentions for me. If, as I had originally suspected, Karl had sent Brandt to her about his and my involvement with Duo, then the attack that killed my roommate, I could only assume, had served as both a solution to the threat I posed and punishment for my actions. Karl's betrayal and the attack couldn't be unrelated; they just couldn't.  
  
And when I'd survived, Prescott could have easily orchestrated my later demise. She could have kept me at RCNP, for instance, and left me to the resident doctor who probably didn't have enough of the right blood on hand and didn't have a surgical team to deal with my injury. I would have died within the hour. Or she could have sent me to Rome in an ambulance and I would have died along the way. Instead, she called in a helicopter and ordered muscle regeneration -- the sort of procedure reserved primarily for military personnel and the incredibly wealthy.  
  
The simple truth of it was, someone who wanted me dead would not have done what Prescott did. Which meant that --  
  
"Why do you sound so shocked? You're a likable person." I straightened, flustered, quickly settling the waist of the clean pair of sweats I'd just pulled on over my hips. I tied the drawstring and I sifted through what I'd just been thinking, hoping that I hadn't said any of it aloud. Oh, right. 'Somebody must still like me.'  
  
"You're one to talk," I replied, turning and reaching for the t-shirt I'd set on the sink. I looked up to meet Heero's eyes in the reflection of the mirror and found him leaning against the door frame, toeing the heavy door open a little further. "I don't understand how anyone can tolerate either of us."  
  
"Most people can't." He raised an eyebrow and cast a pointed look at the shirt I'd just shrugged into. I looked down at it and rolled my eyes. Unlike most other patients in this hospital, I didn't have my own clothes at home that I could send my friends to fetch for me. I only had hospital scrubs and what my friends brought from their wardrobes. So Heero's sweats were too big, Trowa's were too long and Duo's t-shirts had screen prints of mobile suits with flower wreathes around their heads and big letters that read 'Make Love, Not War.' I laughed in spite of myself and pulled it back over my head, turning it inside out before putting it back on. Heero's mouth was pressed into a flat smile. "We got lucky," he added.  
  
I busied myself looking for a hair tie. "That's not what I'd call it, but whatever." When I looked up, I caught him staring at my back. I hadn't realized the hem of the shirt was folded up a few inches on the left side, exposing the scar in all its red, shiny ugliness. I quickly fixed it and shot him a defensive glare. "It's no different from any of yours."  
  
His eyes swung up to meet mine in the mirror. "Technically, no."  
  
"I wouldn't expect you to treat it differently."  
  
He shrugged. "Scar tissue is scar tissue."  
  
"Then why were you staring? Why does everyone stare at it? It's just like all the others."  
  
"Because that jackknife wasn't an indiscriminate attack aimed at a Gundam or an enemy wearing the right uniform; it was meant for you alone."  
  
"Well, if you or Duo or Trowa had been there, you'd be in my place right now." That was probably a lie, but Prescott's reasons for the attack were much easier to voice, and they were all I could express to Heero right then, unsure as I was now about her role in the attempt on my life. "They found out I was one of the five Gundam Pilots, and they didn't want me sharing the same space with them anymore. I'm honestly surprised it didn't happen sooner. It could have happened to any of us."  
  
I crossed my arms over my chest and turned around to lean back against the sink. Heero watched me as if he were suspicious of my answer. We probably would have remained in our stubborn stalemate, but Trowa strode into the room then and paused in the doorway to the bathroom, raising a slim eyebrow at both of us. With the arrival of his partner, Heero dropped his eyes from mine and let the tense moment go, turning to head out into the main room. Trowa angled himself enough out of the way so he could pass, but not so far that Heero's shoulder didn't brush his chest. I fought down the knee-jerk resentment I'd felt every day that Trowa showed up after Heero and I had trained together. Perhaps it stemmed from being an only child, but I didn't want anyone else to see what we shared on those days. Or maybe living in a giant room with dozens of other men had made me selfishly cling to the time I had alone with one of my only friends.  
  
"How did rehab go today?" Trowa asked as I carefully leaned down to pick up the scrubs I'd been wearing. A few stray hairs fell in my face and I wished for Duo's bandanna. It obviously hadn't made the trip to Rome with me.  
  
"It went very well, thank you," I said, finally allowing myself to limp back to bed. Trowa didn't offer his hand, and I wouldn't have taken it anyway.  
  
Once settled, the three of us sat in silence, Trowa casually slouched in one of the chairs with his legs crossed, Heero leaning back in his with one foot propped up on the hard plastic bed frame. I sat cross-legged on top of the blankets and gulped down half the water in my cup. The three of us weren't big talkers and when we were together, it was even worse. It wasn't altogether uncomfortable, but I knew they were both waiting for me to start.  
  
"So," Trowa finally began. "Heard any interesting news lately?"  
  
"I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the news, actually. I liked the insulated bubble I'd cultivated on the inside."  
  
Trowa's lips twitched. "Not what I meant, Chang."  
  
"Yes, I know, Barton."  
  
Trowa uncrossed his legs and then lifted right over left. "So, what's the verdict? Heero's dying to know. Can't you tell?"  
  
I looked to Heero and he raised his shoulders in a small shrug, his body language apologizing for Trowa. I shook my head in reply; _he is who he is._  
  
"I'm honestly surprised that Une didn't give you the scoop herself; she must know by now," I said.  
  
Heero looked to Trowa, but his partner was looking at me with a small, empty smile that said, 'Even if I knew, I'd want to hear it from you first, so get on with it.' I clenched my jaw and my fists in my lap and then relaxed them. "The verdict is protective custody," I said, meeting Heero's gaze and glancing to see Trowa's reaction. He nodded once and looked away. "Prescott and Rorty are still working out the details, but the plan is that, since they both live on-site, I'll stay with one of them for the remainder of my sentence -- under their direct supervision and protection. It goes without saying that they think the quote un-quote dorms are no longer safe for me, but neither are my classes, my duties in the laundry or the kitchen, or any time I spend in the common areas with the other inmates. Instead, to keep up the 'work-study' element of the program, I'll take on personal assistant duties for them. Now, they can lay off a paid administrative assistant and spend that money elsewhere." I stopped to take a breath and to let either of them speak if they chose to.  
  
Trowa's mouth was pressed into a thin line as he examined the hem of his Preventer jacket. Heero rubbed a hand over his thigh and looked like he was formulating a response. Finally, "Will you continue your studies?"  
  
I nodded. "I'll complete my degree in literature through private tutoring from both of them. They're certified."  
  
Heero shook his head. "But it's not just about classes. It's about socialization and preparing you to reintegrate into a community. How are you supposed to do that if you don't see anyone other than Prescott and Rorty?"  
  
I kept my face as blank as I could manage, but a mean, spiteful part of me wanted to sneer and laugh in his face at the very notion that I needed any more "socialization" training that either he or Trowa did, that I was so different from them that I needed three years of schooling and therapy in order to return to society as a fully functional citizen. But Heero really did sound like the system had betrayed him, like it wasn't working the way he genuinely thought it was supposed to, so I tried to keep my irritation to myself.  
  
"I guess they figure they'd rather see me kept alive than ambushed in the laundry again just so I can still interact with the other inmates."  
  
Trowa gave me a sharp glare. If Duo were here, this conversation would have been going a lot more smoothly, I was sure of it.  
  
"He means, asshole, that there would seem to be other, more constructive ways of keeping you safe than locking you up with the warden for the next ten months."  
  
I nodded a sort of apology. "Tell me about it. But what can I do? They've already convinced the Board that I'm at risk in the main facility. And it's only for ten months."  
  
"We should talk to Une about it," Heero offered, thumping the front two legs of his chair back to the floor.  
  
"Une already knows about it." Trowa murmured, looking a little sheepish when Heero's gaze snapped to his. "I talked to her today, and she thinks it's a good idea." Then, turning to me, "She wants you kept out of trouble until you can come work with us."  
  
"What about staying with us?" Heero interjected.  
  
We both looked at him as if he were crazy.  
  
He shook his head at us. "I'm serious. If RCNP is where the danger is, why can't you be under our supervision? It'd remove you from the inmates who want to hurt you and you'd still be in the vicinity, with Preventers looking out for your safety and training."  
  
I didn't want to be a jerk, not to Heero, but, at that point, I also hated to feel hopeful. The prospect of living with Heero and Trowa, in Rome, for the next ten months was worlds away from being essentially chained in Prescott's basement. But it was also essentially impossible.  
  
"It's protective custody, Yuy, not house arrest," I grumbled. "You can't just put a bracelet around my ankle and tell me not to leave the apartment while you're at work. They don't do that for war criminals."  
  
"And it's a bit of a conflict of interest," Trowa added softly.  
  
"Not to mention nepotism."  
  
"So what?" Heero snapped, surprising us both. He turned to Trowa. "What wouldn't you have done for Quatre?" he asked. "What wouldn't you do for me?"  
  
I stared at him and thought that, in Duo's absence, Heero had stepped up to fill his shoes. And I realized that I really didn't know how to handle people like them. From the looks of it, Trowa didn't either.  
  
"I... we should talk to Une again, I guess," he said, giving his partner a strange look.  
  
"No!" I blurted and they both jumped in their seats. Heero met my gaze and I realized that I had to make him see that this was like our _t'ai chi_ in the physical therapy gym. This was something they couldn't do for me; it was something I had to see through to the end, on my own, for more reasons than they knew. "If word got around -- and you know that it would -- that two ex-Gundam pilot Preventers were sheltering another ex-pilot war criminal, how do you think that would go over with the kinds of people who tried to kill me? You would be in as much, if not more, danger than I am."  
  
Trowa was still staring at Heero like his partner had punched him in the gut, and I had a feeling it was because he'd never been forced to really confront Heero's question before -- at least not concerning Heero, who, I was nearly certain now, was more than just a fellow pilot. He didn't look particularly happy to be contemplating that question, either; in fact, he looked like he'd rather be anywhere but in an uncomfortable hospital chair contemplating that question with me three feet away from them.  
  
"You should just let this happen the way it's going to; let them handle it, and let me handle it," I added, needing to fill their silence. "I'm... I'm not saying that I don't want your help, and I don't want you to stop coming to visit, but just... leave it alone for awhile."  
  
Heero was watching Trowa from the corner of his eye with poorly veiled resignation, indicating that he knew he and his partner had a long private conversation ahead of them. I wished that they would go ahead and get on with it and leave me alone. I'd already had a week to contemplate the rest of my time at RCNP, and I was coming to grips with it -- I was almost glad Duo wasn't around to freak out about it. Listening to Heero's reaction wasn't inspiring much confidence that Duo would be fine with Prescott's decision when he finally heard the news. If he didn't know already, I had to figure out a way to tell him so that he wouldn't do something stupid. Among other things, I also had to figure out how Prescott or Rorty and I were going to get along in close quarters for the next five-sixths of a year.  
  
I had a lot to think about, and I couldn't do it with them here.  
  
They got the message without me having to say a word -- probably due to some subconscious communication skill among the anti-social. We knew when we were no longer wanted, most likely because we hadn't really wanted to be there in the first place. They both stood up and simultaneously started emptying their pockets onto the bedside table -- Trowa stacking the usual protein bars one on top of the next, Heero laying out some fresh fruit and a bag of carrot sticks.  
  
"Thank you," I said, again relying on non-verbal communication to convey that it wasn't just carrot sticks I was grateful for. They nodded, and Trowa gestured for Heero to leave first. As they filed out, Trowa tossed in my direction, "Keep it together, okay? We can't take much more of this."  
  
Then the room was empty. I slumped back against the pillow and grabbed an apple. "No kidding."

+

I recognized his footsteps before I heard his voice. He was coming down the hall at his usual unhurried pace, and then he called a greeting to the night guards stationed outside my room -- Bernardo and Matthew. He'd been on a first-name basis with them since before I'd even woken up, apparently.  
  
"Yo, Matt-man, long time no see! And 'Nardo, you're lookin' pretty trim. Have you lost weight since I've been away?"  
  
"Yeah, you think so? Maria says I've gotta slim down for a wedding this fall. She thinks I won't fit into my tux otherwise."  
  
"Aw, man, is that coffee for us?"  
  
"Sure is. These night shifts have gotta be killer boring for you. Thought I'd at least give you an edge on it, keep your heart racing for a few hours anyway. This is the good stuff from that place you like down by the flower shop. Me, I can't drink it, makes me talk a blue streak -- which, if you think I talk a lot _now_ , boyo, you haven't _seen_ a caffeine buzz until you've seen Duo Maxwell with espresso."   
  
"Sounds pretty terrifying. Oh, are you stayin' late tonight? He's been passing out by about ten these days."  
  
"Nah, I'm just stoppin' in to say 'hey' since I've been gone for awhile."  
  
"Where'd you get to, anyway?"  
  
"Eh, I was here, there, and everywhere."  
  
His voice was getting closer as he came into my room's small entryway. I was absurdly glad to hear it. He'd been gone for two weeks. Fourteen days of silence, and I'd started to worry that Prescott had been right and that it really was because I was a Gundam pilot that I'd been targeted. And if that were the case, then maybe Duo had been next -- his small ship sabotaged so that a malfunction after he'd taken off, when he was in deep space between colony clusters, had caused his ship to turn to scrap without anyone -- least of all me -- knowing what had happened.  
  
But he was here, so I was obviously paranoid. And bored.  
  
I slid out of bed just as he rounded the corner, straightening my clothes, and smoothing back my hair, even though it was a hopeless cause. The hair at my temples had started to grow in again and looked terrible next to the rest of it. I was pretty sure I'd have to shave it all off again once I was back at RCNP. But this was Duo, and he was the last person I needed to impress with a tidy appearance -- as evidenced by his dirty work pants and the gray thermal shirt he wore that had probably been white at some point.  
  
"You're back," I said, watching him slip the duffel from his shoulder and set an opened bottle of iced tea on the table. Right then, it felt like watching these ordinary things could keep a person fed and healthy. I'd missed him. It'd become apparent to me and anyone who had seen us together at all recently, that I really liked Duo. When he was around, I was different. It was the truth, and I wasn't so blind that I couldn't admit it to myself. His absences were good for that sort of thing.  
  
He scratched a hand through his bangs and said, distracted, "Yeah, I'm back." I sought his gaze, and when he finally looked up at me and realized that I was standing without the rigid posture of someone in pain, his face lit up in a bright grin. I stepped forward to greet him and his smile grew impossibly wide. He gripped my elbows and gave me a gentle shake. "Wu, you look amazing on your feet! Not even limping!" I grabbed his elbows in return and couldn't think of a thing to say that wouldn't sound stupid or be too embarrassing. We stood like that, toe to toe, for a few more seconds and I wasn't so dense that I didn't realize now that his closeness was both unnerving and exciting. I grabbed hold of that feeling and put a name to it, or at least attached it to a complete thought. Anything was possible with Duo.


	16. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \---------  
> Note:Takes placed IMMEDIATELY after the last part of the chapter 14.

You headed out to the getaway car   
and hit the open road   
I saw something written in tall clear letters on your face   
but I could not break the code.   
We had hot caramel sticking to our teeth   
and the only love I've ever known burning underneath   
I'm gonna miss you when you're gone.  
_\- "The Recognition Scene"_  
  
We walked down the hall side by side, and I'd been on this route enough times since I'd been here that the guards left us alone so long as we promised not to leave the floor. It looped around anyway, so we could make a complete circuit without having to turn back. Two weeks without Duo had me making this trek alone more often than not, although, in the beginning, Heero had walked it with me, working on my endurance. Duo stayed close now, right by my elbow, even though it was obvious that I didn't need his help. But he hadn't seen me since I'd been able to take more than a few steps on my own, so he probably half-expected me to keel over when a new muscle gave out. I didn't bother to correct him and every time his elbow brushed mine, I found myself looking down at our hands to see just how close they were.  
  
After one loop made in silence, he handed me the bottle of iced tea he'd grabbed off the table before we'd left the room. "Oh, yeah, here. This was for you, but I got a little thirsty on the way over from Kathy's." I took the bottle, and saw that he'd only had a few swallows of it. "It's that fancy kind you like."  
  
It was jasmine, unsweetened, and I did like it. "Thanks."  
  
He kept his eyes straight ahead and smiled. "Yeah, drink up. Don't wanna get dehydrated with all this exercise you've been doing." Then he did turn to look me over. "You look good, ya know? Almost like before you got sick and all this shit happened."  
  
I took a long drink from the bottle. The tea had gotten a little warm, but it was much better than the watery cranberry juice I'd been drinking for over two weeks. "It's all thanks to the high calorie protein bars Barton shoves down my throat and the number of hours Yuy has invested in my muscle rehabilitation." It was also due to the additional exercises I did at night, between the midnight and three a.m. nurse checks. _T'ai chi_ with Heero, along with other flexibility exercises, had worked to get me healthy again, but they weren't making me stronger, not like I'd been before I'd gotten sick. The routine for the last two weeks had been sleeping until about one and training myself until half past two, or until I was ready to drop, whichever came first. And it was working. Not only was I making quicker progress, but I was also so tired by the end of it, that I could pass out right afterward and not have to think about the next ten months of my life. I was not looking forward to living with Rorty at night and bringing him coffee during the day, and I was certain Duo would hate the idea, too.  
  
"But thanks," I added, flushing a little. I drank more of the tea and waited for him to talk.  
  
"So, uh, it's protective custody, then?" He finally said, reaching around to rub the back of his neck and giving me a sidelong glance.  
  
I nodded. "I see I don't have to give you the good news."  
  
He shrugged. "Heero told me when I got back in town."  
  
I snorted a humorless laugh. "Did he mention his proposed alternative?"  
  
Duo returned the laugh. "Yeah, the three of you living together for nearly a year? I mean, if only that was how the world worked, you never would have come here in the first place."  
  
"So, you don't think the solution of protective custody is the right one?" I was fishing for more from him, and he could probably tell.  
  
He shook his head. "I don't think you're ready to go back there at all, let alone live with the administrators who you think orchestrated this whole thing."  
  
His tone rubbed me the wrong way, like he thought I really couldn't handle living at RCNP again. "What do you mean, 'not ready?'" I snapped, feeling secure in my newly reacquired 130 pounds and not entirely opposed to the notion of proving it to him.  
  
"I mean, you just got cut to ribbons, and now they're sending you back not four weeks after it happened!" He turned to look me over again and his eyes flew wide just as I stepped into his space with a mean smile and twisted his arm around into a solid hold, shoving him neatly up against the wall and kicking his legs apart in the kind of time that would have made any Preventer proud. And all this without dropping the iced tea bottle. Moving like that didn't hurt, and I wasn't out of breath. It was a stupid display of testosterone, but I didn't care. It felt good to do that and not have an officer breathing down my neck, telling me to 'ease off,' and 'get back to your cell' and, 'you can look forward to extra kitchen duty this week, Wufei.'  
  
Pinning him in place like that, I felt his sharp breathing in the way his back pressed against my arms and I quickly let him go, stepping back as he straightened himself out. His neck and ears were stained bright red, which I'd learned meant he was really embarrassed. "You were saying?" I drawled, and he stuck his tongue out at me, tugging on his sleeves and running a hand through his hair.  
  
"Yeah, okay, so you can be intimidating again -- big deal, Chang," he grumbled. "You're honestly gonna tell me you're not scared to go back? You're not scared at all?"  
  
I held his gaze for another few seconds and then frowned down into the tea, taking a small sip, and thinking that maybe I shouldn't have used so much energy so soon. I felt like I'd just stood up too quickly getting out of bed.  
  
He was right of course -- I would be an idiot to feel no trepidation in returning to RCNP. But -- "About that, Duo." I paused, scanning the corridor for a chair.  
  
"About what," he said irritably, looking both ways down the hall.  
  
"Duo, I've -- since you've been away, I've had to confront the fact that, if Prescott had really wanted me dead, she wouldn't have had me flown here, and she certainly wouldn't have authorized Regen." I made my way over to a small waiting area and lowered myself into a chair, feeling a little better. I looked up to see Duo standing in front of me.  
  
"So, what are you saying?"  
  
I shrugged. "I'm saying that Prescott told me she was putting me in protective custody because Karl told _her_ my identity as a Gundam pilot had been leaked. I'm saying maybe she put me in Regen because she really does want me to join Preventers after this is all over."  
  
"And that she really doesn't give a shit that you and Karl thought she'd been behind the deaths of Bennett and Wasyliw?"  
  
"Maybe she doesn't even know. Maybe Brandt never told her. I don't know, but, Duo, think about it -- why would she save my life and authorize the miracle fix for organ and tissue trauma if she wanted me dead?"  
  
Duo didn't answer right away, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking at the floor. I started to stand up, about to suggest that we go back to my room, when I experienced another wave of dizziness so severe that I had to sit down again. Duo looked up and then scanned the hallway again.  
  
"I think I overdid it," I said, and my voice slurred a little. "I need to get back to my room to lay down for awhile."  
  
He was at my side in the time it took me to blink, taking the bottle from my hand and sliding his arm under mine. "Okay, buddy, take it easy. Told ya you weren't ready."  
  
"Bite me, Maxwell," I grunted, trying to focus my blurring vision.  
  
He ignored me and hoisted me to my feet without another world, steadying my arm around his shoulders, holding on tight to my wrist. "Lean your head on me, alright?" he said when I was settled. "We'll be there in a second; just keep it together until then."  
  
We walked as quickly as I could manage, and I was grateful that it was dark and that most of the visitors and staff had gone home. The shift had changed shortly before we'd started on our walk so there wouldn't be a nurse waiting to scold me for over-exerting myself. The halls were mostly empty and when we reached my room, the two night guards were leaning back in their chairs with their eyes closed, not even looking our way. Duo's other arm was wrapped tightly around my ribs and it felt warm and secure there. I was getting a little chilled and when I shivered he tightened his grip.  
  
"Easy, Wu. Just had to insist on a walk, didn't ya."  
  
We shuffled over to the bed and he had to shove my legs up onto the mattress. I could barely move them, but I realized, as he straightened them out in front of me, it wasn't because of muscle pain or weakness. In fact, nothing hurt.  
  
"Duo, something's wrong." I turned to watch him drag a chair close to my bed, his blue eyes dark and hooded. "I can't feel my legs. You should go get the nurse."  
  
He met my eyes and then took my hand where it lay limp beside me. I could barely feel him squeeze my fingers, even though I really, really wanted to. Then he shook his head.  
  
"...You're not going to get the nurse?"  
  
He squeezed again. "No, Wu."  
  
My eyelids drooped and I forced them open again. "Why n -- " I saw the near-empty bottle of tea on the table and fought to return my eyes to his. They were impossibly heavy by then, even though my brain was trying to shoot my limbs full of adrenalin. My heart thudded loudly in my ears but I felt nothing. "Those guards are asleep, aren't they."  
  
He nodded, "Yeah."  
  
I licked my lips, my tongue thick and heavy in my mouth. "You donno what you're doing. You donno what this'll mean for you."  
  
He squeezed harder and I just barely felt it. "I know exactly what I'm doing. What I should have done a long time ago."  
  
I fought to put together the last words I knew I'd be able to get out before the drug put me under. "Duo, why didn' y'just ask me?"  
  
Surprise registered in his eyes the moment before I was out.

+

 

The gentle rhythm of a moving vehicle was the first sensation I became aware of, followed by the warmth of the sun on my face, and then the feel of a seatbelt across my chest and waist. I tried moving my fingers and felt fabric upholstery under one hand and fake leather under the other. My cheek was pressed against similar material and when the vehicle went over a bump in the road, my head lolled from side to side before coming to rest again. Whatever road I was on, there were lots and lots of bumps, along with tight curves and steep slopes. I heard gears down-shifting and then cranking up again, heard the vehicle struggle up the hills and roar back down.  
  
My mouth was dry and disgusting, and I was cold. I tried to hug my arms tighter around myself and found that they could move, and that they were clothed in an unfamiliar, but comfortable shirt. I wiggled my toes and found them inside sneakers that were a little too big. And I realized I was wearing jeans for the first time, ever.  
  
I finally cracked an eye open and saw that I was outside -- really outside -- for the first time in over two years. The window was down far enough to allow a cool breeze on my face, and I breathed it in, smelling mountains.  
  
"You awake?"  
  
I grunted a rough, "No," before opening the other eye to get a good look at the view outside the window. The mountains were big and covered in green. A few trees had turned bright red. "Where are we?"  
  
Beside me, in the reflection of the glass, I could see Duo chuckle. "Smack in the middle between Milan and Venice and headed north to the foothills of the Alps." He handed me a bottle of water, and I turned to glare at him. "Nothing in this one, I promise," he said, as though drugging me before had been only the tiniest of violations.  
  
I stretched in my seat and took the bottle, sniffing it before taking a few swallows. I didn't feel too hungover, just like I'd had a really good night's sleep. "How long was I out?"  
  
I shoved the water bottle into a cup holder in the console, and he down-shifted to get around a steep, downhill curve. "'Bout twelve hours."  
  
"Have you slept yet?" It was something to fill the space while I got myself together, but he laughed and shook his head.  
  
"No -- why, you offering to drive?"  
  
I rolled my neck and blinked a few times. My eyes were gritty and my limbs still felt heavy. "Not unless you're planning on taking us into one of these ditches or down the side of a mountain. Because I think I could manage that." He laughed again and fell silent. "Where are we going, anyway?"  
  
"Gonna go pick up _Scythe_ where I stashed her."  
  
"Where I imagine she's hidden by your illegal cloaking system."  
  
He grinned straight ahead. "You got it, buddy."  
  
"And where -- "  
  
"Hey," he cut me off, turning to give me a nervous grin. "Let's not spoil it, okay?" I raised an eyebrow at him and he reached over to pat my knee. "Just trust me."  
  
I looked away out the window at the dramatic scenery whizzing by in a blur of green and brown. "Funny thing, I do."

 

+

 

"Duo, are you out of your _goddamn_ mind? Did you wake up and just _forget_ to bring along your usual capacity for rational thought? What could you have been _thinking_? Do you have absolutely _no_ sense of self-preservation, no concept of consequences or repercussions? Did you even _think_ about what would happen to you if you got caught _drugging_ two guards and _kidnapping_ me from the hospital? What -- How could you -- Why didn't you just...? Aarrgghh!"  
  
"Now he's awake."  
  
"Shut up. Just shut up. I need to think. I need to figure out what the _fuck_ I can do to fix this. You know, you never change, do you? Two wars, one of our best friends is dead, I am -- I _was_ \-- incarcerated, and you still operate like you're invincible, like nothing can touch you. I just realized you're the biggest egomaniac I've ever known to think that you could pull off something like this."  
  
"Am I not pulling it off?"  
  
"Are we on your ship yet, safely speeding through outer space with no Earth Sphere officials on our tails?"  
  
"No, but -- "  
  
"Are you absolutely certain that we won't be followed or pursued or _hunted_ no matter where we go from here on out?"  
  
"Of course not."  
  
"Can you guarantee that neither of us will be thrown in prison for the rest of our lives if we're caught?"  
  
"Well, that seems a little drastic, don't you -- "  
  
" _Can_ you?"  
  
"No, Wufei, I can't guarantee that the two of us won't be in deep shit if we're caught."  
  
"Then, _no_ , you're not pulling it off! You are far from pulling it off. You are so far from pulling it off that we can't even _get_ to your ship, because someone followed you here when you dropped it off. And now we're stuck here at the bottom of the hill, in this piece of shit truck, which has made me carsick, with at least three vehicles full of Preventers swarming around the _top_ of the hill with your ship in the middle of it."  
  
"Sure, but they can't get in. Only I can get in."  
  
"... _How_ can you be so calm about this?"  
  
"'Cause I've got you to help me bust her out."  
  
"Duo, let's try to be rational here, for just a few seconds, okay?"  
  
"Okay."  
  
"You are a Preventer. Even if you don't have a badge, they pay you to help them. You cannot fight them in order to get onto your ship. You cannot shoot Preventers if you are a Preventer."  
  
"So, what, you wanna go back to the hospital and just say, 'Sorry, my friend tried to spring me from prison. But I didn't wanna go, so I'm back now. Go 'head and take me in?'"  
  
"Yes!"  
  
"Well, I can't do that. Remember, right before you passed out, you said, 'Duo, why didn't you just ask me?'"  
  
"No, I don't remember that."  
  
"I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You were pretty far gone. But you did say it, and then I thought for a minute that maybe I hadn't even needed to drug you, that you would have just walked out with me. Why do you, all of a sudden, _want_ to go back to prison?"  
  
"You'd _drugged_ me; how could you expect me to be thinking straight? And it's not a prison; it's a rehabilitation facility."  
  
"Ha. Ha."  
  
"And I don't want to go back."  
  
"Then why -- "  
  
"I don't want you to end up there with me, you dimwit, or worse, somewhere I can't see you -- or, look out for you, somewhere I can't look out for you."  
  
"...Oh."

+

"It's time to make a choice, Wu," he whispered, keeping his eyes on his ship -- or where he knew his ship to be. The six Preventers circling around it were tossing stones at it to figure out its dimensions. "You either help me get my ship out of this mess, or you do somethin' real ugly to get these guys to take you back to Rome."  
  
I crouched next to him on the rocky slope and watched the officers circle what appeared to be nothing in the middle of an old gravel lot. "I'm not ready to make that choice yet, so keep talking a little longer. Tell me how they followed you here when your illegal cloaking technology was functioning perfectly."  
  
He shifted closer and sat back on his heals. "Ah, well, unfortunately, I don't think it's a very interesting story. _Scythe_ 's not a noisy ship, but she runs pretty hot -- keeps me warm in space, ya know? And, more importantly, she runs less efficiently in Earth's atmosphere, so she leaves a heat trail for those who're lookin' for it. Which, apparently, somebody was."  
  
"You weren't figuring that anyone would track where you went?"  
  
He shook his head and then winced when one of the agents tossed a larger rock out of what appeared to be sheer boredom. It clanked noisily against metal and then rolled a few yards away. "Rome's a busy spaceport, and I told'em I was just taking her to Sam's for some maintenance. They don't usually track small vessels traveling domestically, not until you reach another port town and they latch onto your codes -- which they wouldn't have anyway 'cause I was cloaked."  
  
"And yet..."  
  
"And yet."  
  
"So, why aren't Yuy and Barton here? You'd think they'd be the first to arrive if Preventers knew it was your ship."  
  
"Maybe no one told them."  
  
"Or maybe, they're doing the smart thing and distancing themselves from you, since you've abruptly turned felon."  
  
He shook his head and turned to give me an angry stare. "Wufei, if you don't decide what you're gonna do in the next few seconds, I'll have to decide for you, and that's probably something you'll resent me for in the future, so either shut up and think or tell me you'll help -- "  
  
"Hsst! Listen!"  
  
He shut his mouth and I could see him straining to hear the agents' conversation, but his eyes didn't leave mine, even as what the men said reached our ears.  
  
"...next shift'll get here in about thirty minutes."  
  
"Finally; I'm takin' off now, then. Been here since dawn, and I gotta get some sleep before my next shift. Tony, you comin'?"  
  
"Are you sure you want to leave before Barton and Yuy arrive? You know how they get about that kind of thing."  
  
"Oh, shit," Duo hissed.  
  
"Eh, they're half my age and half my size. They can kiss my fat ass if they wanna make trouble for me."  
  
"Now what?" I whispered. We both jumped at the sound of car doors slamming and an engine roaring to life, tucking ourselves further behind the rocks and waiting for the car to wind past us on its way down the hill. I hoped our truck was far enough out of sight that the two agents who'd just left wouldn't spot it.  
  
"Four agents, two vehicles and twenty minutes," Duo murmured, twisting around to root in the duffel he'd brought along.  
  
"Will they turn you in?" I asked. "Would they do that?"  
  
He turned back to me and grabbed my hand, pressing a loaded Glock into it. "What do you think?"  
  
My hand closed around the grip and it felt like I'd held a weapon like this in a distant, previous life -- certainly not my own. "Is that a rhetorical question, because I'm not sure of the answer. That's why I asked you."  
  
"Okay, look," he whispered, tucking his own weapon into the back of his jeans and then taking hold of my arm. "I know you were in a place whose MO was to train all of this out of you, to make you forget how to do this, to make you believe that it's wrong to do what I'm about to do. So, I understand why you're scared, and I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do. But I'm gettin' the hell outta here and I'm taking my ship with me, and I drugged you and your guards so that I could take you with me, because _I_ believe that it's wrong to put you back in that place where you could be hurt or killed without any of us able to do a damn thing to stop it. So I'd really like it if you came along, because I broke a few laws for you and I'm about to break a few more."  
  
He scrubbed his free hand under his nose and then reached for his bag again, pulling out a black cap and tugging it down over his hair. "So, this is the plan, and if you wanna help me pull it off, that'd be great. First, I have to take care of their radios. Then I have to take care of them. The first part, I can handle on my own. The second part would be a lot easier if you could get the jump on 'em from behind. I'll draw their attention; you go for the quick and sneaky. We do it before our buddies get here and then we don't have to worry about whether they'll turn us in or not. Sound good?"  
  
I looked down at the gun in my hand and then up at Duo. His face was partially hidden in the shadow of his cap, and he cut a familiar figure, crouching on the ground beside me. Even that daredevil grin was lurking in the corner of his mouth. "You won't kill those agents."  
  
The grin spread across his face. "Those guys? No way. I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid."  
  
"Because if you kill them, it's all over. We can never -- "  
  
"Pssh, who do you think you're dealing with?" he interrupted, squeezing my arm and then pulling the brim of his hat lower on his face. "You stay here, and wait for your moment. You'll know it when you see it." Then he turned away and crept off along the hillside, taking his duffel with him.  
  
"Hopefully, not the God of Death," I murmured belatedly.  
  
As soon as he was out of sight, the haze of disbelief that I'd been holding around myself against this entire situation cleared. The strange sounds of birds chirping and tree branches blowing together in the breeze, along with the feel of damp earth and vegetation under my knees was enough to make it all very real. I was here; my senses weren't lying to me.  
  
I thought of roughly twelve more things I wanted to shout at his retreating back. I almost stood up and yelled at him right then.  
  
Where are we going to go from here? Have you thought about what you've done to us? _What are we going to do now?_  
  
I drew a breath to shout every curse I knew, in every language I knew, and instead leaned my head back against the rock and reached for my center, tried to find a bit of balance and quiet before I committed myself to the kind of life I'd been in RCNP to avoid. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of four Preventers' feet shuffling through gravel. I listened to them speak about the nature of Gundam pilots -- what kind of threat we posed to public safety and security, as well as what kind of people we were, at heart.  
  
"They're wild cards -- unpredictable, dangerous and incredibly influential. They're icons, and in this day and age, they're the wrong kind."  
  
"They're just kids. They're boys, and I don't think they're so unpredictable."  
  
"Oh, so you saw this coming?"  
  
"They want to live their lives. They want a future. They're brothers, and brothers love each other. I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner."  
  
"You're getting soft in your old age, Denton."  
  
"I would tell you it's because I'm a mom, but that would only weaken my case in your eyes. So, I'll just stick with the usual, 'You're a pig.'"  
  
I heard another set of feet on the gravel and knew that Duo had made his presence known.  
  
He'd made his choice long before that moment. I'd realized only after I'd woken up in the truck, that Duo's moment had been two weeks before in the hospital when he'd pressed his forehead to mine and told me to wait for him. The future had opened up in front of him then, and he'd chosen his path with a clear head.  
  
It was laid out in front of me now -- what I could choose -- and it was exciting and wide. The prospect of it quickened my breath. Duo had forced my hand, but I didn't feel helpless. I felt angry, but I felt like this, now, was the first choice I'd ever had to make, really on my own. I felt exhilarated because I wasn't sure I'd ever been fully conscious and in control of a choice before.  
  
I heard them speaking again. "Keep your hands in the air, Maxwell."  
  
"I haven't done anything wrong. I just want my ship."  
  
"You've installed banned technology on your vessel, and you're currently parking it on private property."

"That hardly warrants two handguns aimed at my face."  
  
"Safety first, Maxwell. I know what kind of person you are."  
  
I pushed myself to my feet and turned to hoist myself up onto the rocks, bringing the confrontation on the gravel lot into view. Two Preventers faced Duo -- Denton and her partner. The other two were on the far side of the ship, headed silently for the bow, weapons drawn. I was in plain sight if they only turned around, and I was sure that Duo did see me, though he gave no indication of it, not even a blink. But his eyes were hidden by his cap, and standing their alone, he looked suddenly younger and smaller. They would know that he was armed; he carried himself with the easy posture of someone who didn't fear the future. He stood there, assured of his endless supply of good luck. He was a Death God, after all.  
  
My lips moved even as his did; I knew what he would say before he said it. "You don't know anything about me."  
  
Denton put out a conciliatory hand. "My partner's not looking for a fight, even though his posture says he is. We can't let you leave, Maxwell, but this doesn't need to get ugly."  
  
His tone was light, but it wasn't fooling anyone. "This was ugly the second you followed me here and started throwing rocks at my ship."  
  
I'd heard enough, turning away and climbing back down the rocks. My borrowed sneakers struck the damp earth with a muted thud, and when I circled around to come out from behind them, I felt like the rest of me belonged to someone else as well, like I was borrowing everything in order to be able to do this. I held the gun loosely in my hand and walked out into the lot on the far side of Duo's ship. I distantly heard his voice get a little louder.  
  
"Did someone tip you off, or have you been watching me this whole time?"  
  
"You honestly thought you wouldn't be watched?"  
  
He was talking his way into a fight, as far as they knew. I knew he was waiting for me to decrease their number by half.  
  
I drew up behind the first agent; she hung back on her partner's flank as he used Duo's ship for cover, approaching his fellow agents from the side. About three steps away from her, I shoved the gun into the back of my jeans and closed the distance between us, clamping a hand over her mouth and jamming my knuckles into pressure points down her shoulders and back. She still struggled against me, until I pressed the side of my arm hard against her carotid, holding the choke until she went limp and I could lower her to the ground. Her partner whipped around at the sound of shifting gravel, ready to scold her for making noise, then started in surprise, eyes bulging as I straightened and took four long steps toward him, deciding to leave Duo's gun at my back, even as he drew his. He watched me approach him unarmed, and his moment of hesitation cost him. He finally aimed and fired, but I had already moved into his space, pressing his arms up so that the shot went wide. He stepped back and I forced my left leg between and behind his, gripping his right arm and rocking back away from him. He had to follow me, and when I pushed forward again, he went sprawling onto the gravel. I dropped one knee to press firmly on his chest and then brought my fist down on his temple. He went limp just as the sounds of a struggle erupted out of sight on _Scythe's_ stern. A weapon discharged and I heard a familiar voice grunt in surprise. I pressed a hand to my breastbone as I rose to my feet, feeling the bullet as though it had hit me. I came around the nose of the ship, bringing the scene into view and found two unconscious agents on the ground. My best friend was swaying on his feet, fingering a hole in his shirt and looking at me with wide blue eyes. When he spoke, his voice was pained, and filled with disbelief.  
  
"That guy shot me. He shot me in the chest."  
  
I hadn't stopped since I'd left the cover of the rocks, so I kept moving before I could think or feel anything I wasn't ready for, walking right up to him, grabbing the hem of his ugly gray shirt and tugging it up to look for the hole in his chest that should have killed him. My fingers ran into Kevlar, and I breathed again for the first time in what felt like at least ten minutes.  
  
He laughed and then winced, and then his knees went a little wobbly. I grabbed his elbows and helped him to the ground. "Duo -- "  
  
"He fucking shot me. I thought -- I thought that -- "  
  
I pushed his shirt all the way up and fumbled with the heavy velcro straps holding the vest together, finally getting the thing apart so that I could shove the front panel aside, exposing his pale chest and ribs. And there, over his heart, was a large red blotch, spreading outward even as I watched, like an angry sun.  
  
He coughed. "Shit, that hurts."  
  
"Well, this isn't paint ball," I finally managed to croak, strapping him up again and pulling his shirt back into place.  
  
"I fucking hate paint ball. Why would you want to simulate something like that?"  
  
I pressed a hard kiss to his forehead, and he looked up at me, a little shell-shocked. "I don't know," I answered. "I never played it." Then I grabbed his elbows again and pulled him to his feet. "Come on, outer space and pain killers in just a few minutes if you can keep it together long enough to get me on your ship. I'll even drive."  
  
He blinked and snapped out of it like I'd flipped a switch. "Like hell you will, dude. _Scythe_ likes what I do for her; she's gotten attached, if you know what I mean."  
  
I held onto him as we walked. "I don't think it's entirely appropriate to refer to your ship in that manner."  
  
He gave me a small, careful laugh in return for my attempted joke. "Not like I've seen any other action lately."  
  
"Please don't say things like that about a hunk of metal, no matter how close you are."  
  
"Come on, like you didn't feel that way about your Gundam?"  
  
"Just keep moving, Duo. Yuy and Barton will be here any minute."  
  
Duo pressed a hand to his chest and grimaced. "You think they'll understand? Think they'll forgive us?"  
  
I met his eyes, and I must have still looked pretty angry.  
  
"Forgive me?"  
  
I looked away and gave his arm a gentle shove. "Open the damn door."  
  
He nodded and reached for a remote device on his wrist, punching in a lengthy code. The air around his ship shimmered like the yard on a hot day, and abruptly, there was a ship parked in front of us with a hatch dropping out of its belly. _Scythe_ sat pretty low to the ground, so we both bent nearly double getting under her and up the short ramp. In the few steps it took to get inside, Duo had regained full control of the situation, leading me through the small living area -- consisting of two bunks on the closer wall, a wide couch along the opposite, and a low table bolted to the floor just in front of it -- and into the cockpit. He dropped into his seat like he was coming home, and I took the copilot's chair, waiting silently as he leaned forward over the console, powering up the fuel cells and waking up the main computer.  
  
He took off his cap and tossed it onto the console, as though it were the dash of his truck, and scrubbed a hand through his bangs. Even over _Scythe_ 's soft hum, we both heard the sound of car tires on the gravel road, and when I looked to Duo, his tanned cheeks had paled under his freckles.  
  
"We're gonna fly low and fast for a bit before we take off, so you've got about a minute."  
  
I pushed myself back out of the seat and tapped the headrest of his chair as I left the cockpit. "Just get us out of here."  
  
He nodded, and called to me before I'd stepped through to the living area, "We're cloaked again, so they won't be able to see you."  
  
I strode across the small room to one of the four portholes set in the walls, crawling up onto the second bunk to get a look outside through thick, reinforced glass. I braced myself against the wall and the thin mattress as the ship rose smoothly above the lot, displaced air lashing at the two figures standing by their car. Trowa stood with one hand on his waist, the other holding his hair back off his face. Still, several strands escaped and whipped at his cheeks. He looked exceptionally frustrated and angry for someone whose expressions generally ranged from studied indifference to mild disapproval. Heero stood beside him, his face turned up to us, following the sound of the ship. When he raised his hand in farewell, I pressed my own to the glass in return, even though he couldn't see it.  
  
The question of whether or not they'd immediately turn us in was more or less answered when they both leaned back against the hood of the car to watch us, or rather to listen to us rise higher in the sky. I watched them grow smaller until I couldn't see their faces anymore and then turned to slide off the bunk to the floor, trying to keep words like 'enormity,' 'ruined,' and 'future' from tripping me up, instead focusing on how we would make it out of Earth's atmosphere without leaving an easily followed heat trail.

 

+

 

"That's where we're going?" I forced myself to let go of the console, wiping away the sweaty hand prints I'd left behind.  
  
"What better way to get to space than the Southern Alps Spaceport?" Duo said with a grin, spreading his arm wide to encompass the bustling facility spreading across two towering peaks.  
  
"You picked the most populated area in the region to get through Earth's atmosphere."  
  
Duo slid a glance my way, but kept his attention on our approach to the bustling spaceport. "You gotta stop thinkin' like a convict and jump-start that terrorist brain I know is still in there somewhere. If you were tryin' to get Shenlong off-planet, where would you do it? Burning shitloads of fuel on some carrier, looking like a comet on any Earth Sphere official's radar, or..."  
  
"I'd hitch a ride, though I'd probably limit myself to a more inconspicuous approach."  
  
He kept his eyes straight ahead, but he was grinning his approval as we came in close to one of the two metal spires pointing to the sky. The larger civilian transports traveled along these tracks until they gained momentum to make it beyond the atmosphere and into space. Judging by the angle of our descent, we were aiming for the hulking ship slowly gaining speed as it traveled up the left-hand spike.  
  
"We're going to have a long discussion after you pull this off," I said, as calmly as possible, gripping the sides of the chair as he dipped us down into a steep dive.  
  
"Whatever you say," he murmured, eyes locked on our approach as we dropped below the transport and then angled back up to come at it from below.  
  
"I'm serious, there are some things we really need to talk about before we strike off into the unknown."  
  
"Sounds good, just... be quiet for a minute. Gotta concentrate."  
  
I heard _Scythe_ 's landing gear drop, felt the ship come into sync with the transport's ascent, and then we were abruptly stuck to its side, landing gear retracted, and powerful magnets in _Scythe_ belly anchoring us.  
  
We accelerated quickly after that as the transport climbed through the clouds. I checked the seat restraints across my chest and legs for the third time. I'd made the jump from earth to space before, of course, but never as a stowaway _outside_ the vessel. Beside me, Duo's shoulders were tensed, and I could see perspiration at his temples and along his upper lip. Outside the air was growing thinner and turning the color of twilight. I felt the burning warmth of the atmosphere through the glass as it passed over the heat-resistant nose of the ship, and beside me, Duo wiped his sleeve across his forehead. I had visions of the atmosphere scraping us from the side of the transport like a bug off a windshield in a car-wash. But then, finally, thousands of stars popped into stark relief around us and the cockpit darkened as we left the blue glow of Earth. The transport barreled through space on its own power now, headed for L1.  
  
"This is where we get off," Duo muttered under his breath, punching in the command to release the magnetized feet. "Hold on."  
  
The ship lurched and came loose, decelerating rapidly. We were thrown forward in our seats, but then Duo had the controls in hand, moving us forward and in the direction I knew L2 to be. He accelerated again with such easy confidence that I relaxed back against the head rest, tracking the progress of the transport with one eye, and glancing at the sensors every few seconds to see if we were being followed. As we sped off toward Duo's home colony, it looked like we'd made a clean break, due, I was sure, in no small part to our friends' delay in reporting our escape.  
  
When Duo finally blew out a great sigh and unbuckled his safety harness, I reached down to undo mine as well. He got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head, exposing the Kevlar vest he still wore.  
  
"I'll help you get that off," I said, rising out of the co-pilot chair. "They weigh a ton and itch like hell."  
  
Duo nodded and tugged his shirt over his head, reaching for the first of the velcro straps as he came over to me. I rested my right knee on the seat, leaning back a bit to work on the one side of the vest while Duo continued to struggle with the other. He nearly elbowed me in the nose when one of the straps finally came free, and he huffed a short laugh.  
  
"Sorry. Who knew these things were so hazardous to take off?"  
  
"You've never worn one before?" I grunted, tugging the second strap free and pulling the front and back panels apart, exposing a side view of his ribs and waist, before tackling the last.  
  
"Nope. Never felt like it."  
  
I looked up at him and then leaned a little further back in the chair when he jerked his second strap through its loop. My left leg was now practically between his. "Not even during the war?"  
  
He shrugged, and looked a little sheepish, working on the last one.  
  
"You didn't think you needed it, did you."  
  
He looked away when I pushed his hand from the velcro and helped lift the vest off him.  
  
"Why did you this time?"  
  
He crossed his arms over his bare chest. "There were other variables in the equation 'sides me."  
  
I glanced down at him, and the sight of his naked torso gave me a jolt. I jerked my eyes back up to his. "You sound like Heero."  
  
Duo shrugged again. "Sometimes it's easier to say things in Yuy-speak."  
  
I frowned. "You were worried about what could happen to me, but, I'm not that kind of variable, Duo. I can take care of myself. I _was_ taking care of myself before you -- "  
  
Duo exhaled loudly, dropping his arms. The new bruise on his chest stood out vividly against his pale skin. "Let's not do this yet, okay? Let's just... not."  
  
I realized that I could feel his body heat, standing this close to him; I could feel the tension in his muscles in the nervous energy he exuded. "Then what -- "  
  
He took that last partial-step forward, well and truly invading the space I'd been leaning further back to keep, forcing me to half-sit in the co-pilot chair. "Just -- " Then he put one hand on my shoulder and leaned in to kiss me. He watched me with wide eyes while he did it, finally closing them when I didn't push him away. I closed mine when he tipped his chin up, tilting my head back in his eagerness. I reached out a hand to steady myself and grabbed the underside of his arm, felt sweat-slick skin and squeezed. He was leaning forward at the waist to kiss me and he put his other hand just under my ribs when he brought his torso and legs closer to mine, lifting one knee to rest on the seat between my legs. He made a small sound in his throat and changed the angle of the kiss, sliding his hand from my shoulder to the back of my neck. It was easy to circle my other arm around his waist and pull him down into the chair with me.  
  
It didn't appear so easy for him, though; his back tensed and his lips stilled against mine as he held himself over me. Then he shifted his weight, moving one knee to the outside of my hips and lifting the other up so that he straddled my legs. He opened his eyes and looked down at me. I rested my hands on his thighs and felt the adrenalin rush of our escape still slamming through him. I met his gaze and his eyes were sparking with it. I saw painful awareness of what he'd done to us. He'd known exactly what he was doing, but the weight of it was still heavy, and his body under my hands felt like a live wire.  
  
"We're not going to run into anything in the next few minutes, right?"  
  
By reflex, he glanced over his shoulder, but when he turned back, he shook his head, giving me a nervous grin. "You're letting me kiss you."  
  
I pulled him further into my lap, and he hissed when I boldly pushed up against his him. "I'm kissing you back."  
  
He rolled his hips forward, and I felt tension there, too. "Shit, I've been wound so tight these last couple weeks, being away from you."  
  
I slid my hand up his spine, fingers splayed wide to feel as much of him as I could reach. "Where did you go? Why were you gone for so long?"  
  
He leaned down to kiss me again, starting a gentle rocking rhythm between us. "Lotsa places, tryin' to work this out. I wanted to be ready."  
  
"Is this what you wanted to happen?" I grabbed his braid where it hung down the center of his back and wished that I wore fewer clothes so that our chests and stomachs could touch.  
  
He chuckled. "I don't know. Maybe. Yes?" He exhaled sharply against my neck, ducking his head and pushing harder with his hips. "Fuck, that feels good." Pulling the tie from my hair, he rolled it over his own wrist and slid his fingers up along my scalp. He touched a dozen pressure points, raising goosebumps along my arms, and I shivered. "Are you cold? Am I hurting you? Shit, Wu, how's your back? Should I get off?"  
  
I released his braid and wrapped my arm securely around his waist. "Don't move. Don't you dare move." I spoke against his chest as he made to pull away from me, and when he tried to shift back a second time, I closed my teeth over his nipple, biting down just hard enough so that he jerked in my arms like he'd been shocked. "You're not hurting me," I said, a little frustrated that he would think I'd still be so fragile, that I'd ever been so fragile.  
  
He laughed again, nervous. "You're pretty amazing, you know? I wish I was half as -- "  
  
I pulled him hard against me, and the feel of his body -- so like mine, with the same angles and planes, the same kind of heart beating crazily inside his ribs -- it was like wanting another version of myself. Duo was and he wasn't me, but I felt like I recognized everything in him.  
  
"Wu, I -- hngh!" He suddenly arched forward against me, grabbing hold of both my arms and turning his teeth to my neck, gasping out a choked, surprised breath.  
  
I couldn't help the smirk that twisted my mouth when he breathed an embarrassed laugh into the seat. His tensed muscles sagged in my arms, and I heard him lick his lips before speaking. "That wasn't quite how I pictured it." He pushed lazily against my hips a few more times before backing up off the chair and pulling me after him. His grin was relaxed and happy. "So, what was that conversation you wanted to have?"  
  
I raised one eyebrow and opened my mouth to protest his timing, but then his grin turned wicked and he reached forward to palm my crotch through my borrowed jeans.  
  
"Just kidding. I can at least do right by you before you come to your senses and bite my head off." Then he grabbed me by the belt and pulled me into the main room of the ship, pushing me down onto to the wide couch.  
  
When he bit the skin over my hip bone, I laughed at the ceiling.


	17. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \--------------  
> Warnings: um, I'm just gonna rub my hands together and cackle. How's that.

Someone knows what's going on  
Someone knows, and someone's gonna tell  
Someone's gonna wrap us up in styrofoam and paper  
And mail us flat-rate right down to Hell  
_\- "Going to Maine" Mountain Goats_  
  
I awoke to a painful muscle spasm that jolted me right off the bunk and onto the floor. The strangeness of space, of low gravity, had yet to wear off, and I flailed, disoriented, before I managed to regain my balance, bending forward over my knees to stretch my back, fingers digging into the muscle to massage out the cramp.  
  
When the spasm stopped, I straightened and took a slow breath, exhaling and opening my eyes on a strange, dimly lit room. The feel of the bunk under my body had been so familiar, I had been sure that I was in my cell and that across from me, Onur was quietly snoring and that behind me, Karl was restlessly moving about his room, sleepless as ever. It would be dawn soon and I could tap a greeting to him through the wall.  
  
But it probably wasn't dawn. I could see stars through the small portholes in the sides of the ship, but they gave no indication of what time it was. I realized that my internal clock was set to the rotation of the earth and that here, I was drifting without a sense of time, direction or orientation. Minimal gravity wasn't the only source of unease. I heard steady breathing at chest level behind me and turned to see Duo's arm hanging off the side of the second bunk, his face mostly covered by his hair but obviously relaxed in sleep. Still a little shaky, I moved closer to the bunk and touched his palm, causing his fingers to reflexively curl inward. When we'd lived together for that short time, he'd been a light sleeper, easily drawn out of his room if I was up before him or significantly after. Now, he slept the sleep of the truly exhausted.  
  
After we'd escaped Earth's atmosphere, disconnected from the civilian transport, and started for L2, and after we'd... established a few things about our friendship, he'd brought out a veritable feast of cheese, bread, fruit and pastries -- most of his supply of fresh food from Earth. We ate everything he pulled out of his duffel and then we both barely made it into bed, each of us taking a bunk because the idea of sleeping together -- while I'd done it before with Karl -- felt a little too intimate right then. We wouldn't have been able to sleep as well, anyway.  
  
I didn't know how long ago we'd passed out, but I was wide awake now, paying the price for the strain I'd put on my back by taking out those two Preventers. I'd acted without a thought to my physical limitations, and even if I had paused, I probably wouldn't have felt them anyway. Adrenalin worked like that. It had also allowed me to calmly stare down the barrel of a Preventer's gun while he decided whether or not he really wanted to shoot me. I'd been reliving that moment every time I closed my eyes, before Duo and I finally passed out.  
  
Assessing my back and knee now, they felt like they were in pretty good shape, though a little stiff after the sudden workout I'd put them through. I'd still had another week of physical therapy when Duo took me out of the hospital, and without Heero, I'd have to keep working on rebuilding the muscle on my own. I couldn't help smiling at what I was sure Heero's thought process would be concerning Duo's and my new situation: 'Wufei took off for space with Duo. That was a pretty stupid thing to do. Duo doesn't know the first thing about muscle rehabilitation.' Duo wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to methodically do anything with his body. His lifestyle kept him in shape without any real conscious effort on his part.  
  
I thought about running through a few exercises right then, and then mentally shook myself. They wouldn't work the same way here; they were pointless here, and aside from that, very difficult to do. Instead I pulled myself down onto the couch and looked out at the stars. They were up close and three-dimensional now, not just a distant, dark blanket I could glimpse through barred windows. I found it a little disturbing that, as much time as I'd spent on the colonies and traveling through space, I still felt like I was getting further and further from home.  
  
I didn't want to feel that way. The two people I had been closest to at RCNP were either dead or not who I had thought they were. Officer Busey had always been courteous and friendly, but was never my friend; Rorty was a good guy, but I wouldn't miss him; Prescott's heart probably was in the right place, though she still scared me. RCNP should not have felt like home to me. Rome had probably never felt like home to Heero or Trowa. And yet, in the cool quiet of the ship, I was very aware of how alone we were, how there weren't sixty other men in the same room to hear if I shouted or laughed or even used the goddamn suction toilet. There would be no one to bear witness to what we did here.  
  
Whatever that was going to be.  
  
We were headed for L2, bound for Howard's sweeper satellite. We'd regroup and restock there. Duo said that, while he'd been away for those two weeks, he'd spent a fair portion of it with Howard, putting together everything we'd need to live on the run for as long as we had to. He said that Howard was an excellent resource for that sort of thing. From there...  
  
From there, we had a couple big choices to make. I was out -- as free as any fugitive could consider himself to be. If or when we were recaptured, I wouldn't be going back to RCNP. They had real prisons for the people who did the sorts of things Duo and I had just done. One of those big choices had to be whether we were running ahead of the authorities in order to solve this case before they put the kibosh on it for good, or whether we were just running because that was quicker and undoubtedly safer. I didn't know what Duo intended for us, but I didn't think I had the right to tell him what we should do with the time and resources we had. I certainly hadn't yet figured out what to do with them. But neither did I think that I could let the case go, if he asked me to. Benjamin Bennett and Vasil Wasyliw I could drop -- I'd barely known Benji at all. I was glad Basker and O'Malley were dead if for no other reason than they would save a lot of people a lot of grief over the years. Karl was in it up to his neck somehow -- hell, he may have even been the one pulling the strings for all I knew, but he was in Italy, and I was hurtling through space, so right then, I couldn't be bothered to care about him too much. The parts I wasn't so sure I could let go were the bodies I didn't really consider bodies -- my old roommate's and Quatre's. And mine. Onur and Quatre were not the kind of people to ever be left behind. They were the kind that I --  
  
I heard Duo stir behind me, heard him slide from his bunk and scratch blunt fingernails through his hair. I heard him yawn and from the sound of his voice, he was stretching his arms over his head. I finally turned away from the porthole to see him approaching the couch, and inadvertently caught a glimpse of the thin line of dark hair trailing from his belly button to the waist of his jeans. When he lowered his arms it vanished under his shirt, and he hunched forward a bit, wincing and pressing a hand to his chest.  
  
"How do you feel?" I asked, shifting over a bit to make room for him.  
  
He flopped down beside me and thumped his head against the back of the couch, turning enough to look at me. "Like I got smacked in the chest with a mallet."  
  
I grimaced at the image and reached for the hem of his shirt. "Let me see."  
  
Obediently, he lifted the shirt. "It's fine. They knew what they were doin' with that Kevlar shit. I read about it, once. When they're hit by a projectile, the fibers stretch but actually pull closer together. Pretty cool, huh?"  
  
"Yeah. I would have thought, in our line of work, you would have already been familiar with how they protect vital organs from fatal injury." I pressed my fingers around the edge of the bruise, feeling around his sternum for any fractures.  
  
He hissed and whined. "Never saw you with one. None of the others either, for that matter. Face it, Wu, none of us were invested in the idea of living in the world we were fighting for."  
  
"I always thought you were," I answered, not meeting his eyes. "You hit me with a hell of a plan the day they released me from holding. I'd never seen anyone so excited about the prospect of a roommate and a new place to live."  
  
From my peripheral vision, I saw Duo's bony shoulders lift in a shrug. "You know what I came from; you should understand that impulse."  
  
It was my turn to shrug. "I understand very little about you."  
  
Duo laughed, not an altogether pleasant sound. "Liar."  
  
"For instance," I continued. "I don't know why you would throw both your own future and mine into question by drugging my guards, assaulting two Preventers and disappearing into space using an illegal cloaking system."  
  
"Liar."  
  
"Not when I had less than a year left on my sentence, not when I was close to having a degree in pre-Colonial literature, not when you had a good thing going with Sam, steady work and a place to live, not when the four of us could see each other on a regular basis and be relatively functional as normal friends."  
  
"Stop lying."  
  
"You expect me to understand your motivations? Why would you expect me to understand? You obviously didn't. You drugged me before you even asked if I would run with you. You forced this on me."  
  
I had dropped my hand from his chest, and it rested now on his knee. He sat hunched forward, staring at my fingers, brushing my thumb with his. Despite the sharpness of my words, our proximity felt natural.  
  
"You know why I did it. You wouldn't have made it out of that place alive. They were going to kill you. I had to do it."  
  
"You don't know that."  
  
"Yes, I do."  
  
"Is this like the flat in London? Is this for me or for you?"  
  
He grabbed my hand on his knee and squeezed hard. "You're being really cruel."  
  
I sat sideways on the couch, legs folded in front of me, knees close to Duo's thigh, right shoulder leaning against the back. As I watched him, he leaned his head closer to mine.  
  
"You want me to explain myself." He said it like he was dreading it, like he'd really thought he wouldn't have to.  
  
I reached for his hair and smoothed back the ragged pieces of the braid that had slipped out. "I don't know. I want... to make sure that we do something important with this huge mess you put us in. And I want you to see how I see this thing."  
  
He took a shaky breath. "I told you I wanted to be ready. I thought this through; I've been thinking about it since before you got sick. We can go wherever we want now; we can figure this thing out."  
  
"What thing are you talking about?"  
  
He hesitated and finally looked me in the eye. "What thing are _you_ talking about?"  
  
"I asked you first."  
  
He opened his mouth to speak, shut it, looked at me oddly as though he'd just realized we might be speaking of different 'things', then tried again. "I want to help you find who's responsible for the attempt on your life. I want to help you find the connection between the former war-time leaders that have suspiciously wound up dead over the last couple years." He was watching me for my reaction. I nodded for him to continue. "And I want to go to L4, because my gut's telling me that's where shit started." He paused and grabbed his braid, pulling it over his shoulder and tugging the tie free. "Does that sound okay?"  
  
I nodded. "Yeah."  
  
He started undoing the braid, working his fingers through the snarls. "Is that the thing you were talking about?"  
  
"Pretty much."  
  
"Am I seeing it the way you see it?"  
  
"Probably not, but I imagine you will once life as a fugitive starts to catch up with you and you feel more like a criminal."  
  
He snorted and shoved my shoulder, and just like that, the escalating hostility neither of us wanted to feel towards each other dissipated. "Just who do you think you're dealing with here?"  
  
I laughed and rolled back to lie flat on the couch. Natural as breathing, Duo followed me, holding himself still over me, half undone braid nearly touching my chest. Our knees bumped as he hovered and then settled his weight.  
  
"Ah, this is what you must have meant when you called me a liar," I said. "You think we're alike now, that we share a distinctly delinquent mindset. We of the troubled past and difficult adolescence, of the foggy future."  
  
He abruptly pulled himself back down beside me, wedging himself between me and the back of the couch, breathing a curse and rubbing his chest again. But he was still grinning. "You're an ass, but I like where this is going. We could be like Bonnie and Clyde, except since we're both dudes, Barnie and Clyde. Or... that other one I watched with Hilde. Shit, what was that called? Laverne and Shirley. No, no, that's not it. Fuck. Anyway, these two chicks take off into the desert and embark upon a life of illicit affairs and small time crime. I think they end up driving off a cliff, though, to avoid the authorities."  
  
I raised an eyebrow at him.  
  
"Yeah, let's agree to not do that, okay?" he laughed.  
  
"You don't have to convince me; I've just been handed a new lease on life. Why would I waste it so foolishly?"  
  
His smile faltered, and I couldn't decide whether to feel guilty about my tone of voice or not. I'd never pretended to be a kind person, and he knew that. Still, judging by the forced chuckle that followed, I'd stuck him with something sharp.  
  
"Look, I -- " he started, dropping his eyes to my chest. "I don't know what I expected your reaction to be to all this. I admit I was hopeful that you would be okay with it, maybe even glad that I did it. But if you're not, and I can see that you're not, you should just get it off your chest now. I can't take back what I did, and I would do it again in a heartbeat, so I -- "  
  
"How could I be glad that you did this, Duo?" I interrupted, trying to get him to look at me. He wouldn't. "You put yourself, your future, your livelihood -- everything, you put it all at tremendous risk. What kind of a person would I be if I were glad that you'd done that -- even if it was for me?"  
  
He kept his head down, though, this close to me, he couldn't seem to resist the temptation to get closer. He spread his fingers over my stomach, clenching and relaxing his fist, bunching up my shirt and then letting it go. "You'd be what I always wanted us to be during the wars. All of us, not just you and me; I wanted us to be more than instruments. I wanted to know that we would all do this for each other."  
  
"I wouldn't have broken you out of prison." It hurt more than I thought it would to admit that.  
  
He nodded. "I know. Heero did once. I don't think he meant to. I think he wanted to kill me, but that's when I thought that maybe we could be something more to each other than temporary allies. Heero wouldn't let me be that for him, even if part of him wanted to. Trowa had no interest, or he couldn't figure out how to show me if he did. Quatre was... I never felt like I could get close to him."  
  
"Why not?" I interjected. "He was the kindest person I've ever known. He liked you very much."  
  
Duo lifted his eyes to mine long enough to hint at something like jealousy, but then he looked away again.  
  
"I would never have fit into his world, and I'm still not sure I really wanted to, even though it seemed like he would have been the one most likely to bring us all together. I didn't try hard enough with him, but he didn't try that hard, either." He took a deep breath and forced a grin back into his voice. "So you see, there's only you, my friend. There's only us."  
  
I relaxed back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, and tried to interpret exactly what that meant for me, and why I was here with him, why exactly he'd done what he did. I was immediately reminded of our brief time living together, a time when he'd said he was committed to building a future for both of us. I questioned his reasons then, and I questioned them now, but right then didn't seem like the best time to draw out exactly what purpose I served for him. He wouldn't know what to say and I wouldn't know what to believe.  
  
"There is only us, and it's your fault that it's only us. But I helped you take out those Preventers, and I let you leave Yuy and Barton behind. So I accept that we're alone." His hand squeezed in my shirt and I placed my own over top of it. "Though I reserve the right to yell at you about it in the future, when it's appropriate."  
  
He lifted his gaze to mine. "That's fair," he said. "Until then, we still get to do this, right?" He rolled on top of me again, supporting himself on his elbows and touching our noses together. He waited for me to kiss him, which I did.  
  
"I do like this," I said into his mouth.  
  
"You're very good at it."  
  
'I've had practice' was on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed that response in favor of mumbled thanks.  
  
"Hey, do you want to clean up?" he asked. "I feel pretty gross, myself."  
  
I closed my eyes and arched under the hand he slid up my shirt. "That would be fantastic."  
  
"We should definitely share, though. Gotta conserve water, ya know."

+

Duo was struggling to get his hair back into a braid after the cursory scrub he'd given it with the sponge while I examined my reflection in the small bathroom mirror. I turned my face to the left, lifting away my hair to look at the scars that remained by my ear and along my cheek. Compared to my back and knee, I'd paid them very little attention, not even looking at them when I'd brushed my teeth in my hospital bathroom. They hadn't hurt much, and they didn't limit my ability to function normally. But they sure were ugly. The abrasions and bruising between my ear and temple had faded, with no permanent damage; however, the fillet knife to the face had left a nearly three inch slice from the ear cartilage to where my jaw bones came together. About two of those inches were still an obvious red line bisecting my cheek. The surgeon had stitched it up from the inside so that the scar would shrink and flatten to a line within a few years. It would probably look like a wrinkle by the time I was thirty.  
  
Staring at it now, I could turn the dim space of the bathroom and the white noise of the ventilation system into the dark cavern of the laundry. The stainless steel hand rail under my hands was cold cement, and I was on my knees. That dark pile of Duo's clothes in the corner was actually blood pooling from Onur's gut. And the faint pull of scar tissue when I opened my mouth wide was the burning, tearing pain of a blade splitting skin.  
  
I blinked a few times and stood up straighter.  
  
There wasn't anything I could do about my face, but my hair I could fix. In the weeks since I'd been admitted to the hospital -- when they'd had to shave a lot of the hair on the right side -- much of it had grown back. There were still two small bare patches, which would hopefully shrink after enough time passed. My hair had gotten long enough again that I could put it all back without the need for Duo's bandanna, but the short patch on the side looked very strange, so cutting it all off again seemed like the most reasonable solution. The first cut had marked my entrance to RCNP; this one would mark my exit.  
  
By then Duo had managed to rebraid his hair and was half-dressed in boxer shorts and a t-shirt. When he caught sight of my reflection, I saw his brow dip down in distress. He let go of his towel, and I tracked its slow progress to the floor as he shifted over to stand at my back, hooking one arm across my chest and grabbing hold of my shoulder. "Wufei," he said, barely above a whisper. With his other hand, he touched the scar.  
  
"It doesn't matter," I said.  
  
"It won't stay that ugly. And it means you were stronger than them."  
  
"It makes everything visible to anyone who wants to look."  
  
He shrugged. "You were already visible." He turned his lips to my ear and kissed the damaged cartilage. I flashed back to him in my lap, kissing me there just after I'd helped him out of his Kevlar vest. It hadn't even registered then that he'd been touching the scar, I'd so successfully blocked out that whole side of my face.  
  
"Hey, will you help me cut my hair? It looks ridiculous like this."  
  
He squeezed his arm tighter around me and nodded. "Yeah, sure. Let me put some pants on."

+

"Duo, this is amazing! I can't believe how much work you've put into this. Did you ever sleep?" I looked over his shoulder at the list of files he'd brought up on his laptop. He'd clicked through a few to show me his organization system, and with each name, he'd compiled the articles surrounding and covering their death. Along with that, he had names and numbers of living relatives and former employers, as well as civic groups they'd been involved with.  
  
The orderly manner in which he kept them triggered a foggy memory from my time in the hospital, when my brain had been telling me that Karl was coming to see me every night, taunting me with freedom and information.  
  
_'Duo's got the names and addresses of living relatives and former employers. He's even marked a few that he contacted. This is where you should pick up, Chang...'_  
  
Sure enough, Duo had indicated which vets he'd already investigated, who he had contacted, and what they'd said.  
  
"I didn't really have much to do at Sam's when I wasn't working," he explained, forcing me back into the conversation. "Combing newsprint and police report databases was actually pretty interesting. I've kept up on colony politics. L3's been having some trouble with their Francophone population, primarily over language in the primary schools. L2 is still fucking broke and dealing with an aging population. The kids can't take care of the parents, so crime rates are through the roof. And, no, I don't miss that place. L1 sprang a leak not long ago, and nearly sucked a bunch of its residents into space. It's been hair-raising."  
  
"Duo, this is -- "  
  
"Oh, and here," he grunted, reaching for his duffel and grabbing out of it a brown envelope stuffed nearly to ripping. He slid it over to me, admitting as though he were a little embarrassed, "I printed it all out for you so we can look this stuff over separately. You don't have to look over my shoulder, and maybe you'll pick up things that I missed, people you knew during the wars."  
  
I nodded and picked up the envelope, sliding down to sit between the couch and table, carefully arranging what he'd compiled out in front of me. I glanced at a few of the names -- there were maybe thirty files. "What do you think so far? Is there anything all these have in common?" I picked a random file and glanced over the obit and police report. Forty-three-year-old male, anti-Alliance colony rebel (L4) since AC 178, died from complications due to severe assault and battery, no suspects. Survived by a younger sister still on L4. Before his death, he was an active practitioner of his faith and the leader of a group to preserve Arabic as a spoken language in his community.  
  
"Well," Duo started, "I'd say, the majority of cases I've found -- war-time leaders who died or were killed under strange circumstances -- have been colony-based, either anti-Alliance or White Fang. I haven't come across many Alliance, OZ, or Romafeller vets. There's a handful in here, but the majority are from the colonies. L2, L4, and L5 were the most frequent." He gave a bitter shrug. "Of course L2 might pose a bit of a sampling problem. Shitty stuff happens to pretty much everyone equally. It'd be nearly impossible to separate what's random and what's planned. Those doing the planning wouldn't have to really even plan; the random would take care of it, more often than not."  
  
"Okay, maybe we should stick with L4 and L5, then. You said you wanted to go to L4, anyway." I leafed through a few more files. "Several of these are from the L4 cluster. Is that why?"  
  
"Sort of. But I want to go to L4 because I want to talk to Quatre's sisters and the Maguanacs to figure out what happened with him. I want his schedule, his journals, his medical records. I want to know who he was talking to before he died, just like these men. Maybe learning what really happened to him will explain why so many L4 colony leaders have ended up dead. "  
  
"That's a bit of a leap."  
  
He shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not." Then he lifted his head at the beeping sound from the cockpit. "Hey, hold that thought; we got a message."  
  
He rose to his feet and I hesitated to follow, since, if it was a two-way visual transmission, it wouldn't do for me to be seen with him. But he gestured for me to come with him.

"Yeah, why not. We're still half a day out." He turned to me. "Just stay over there, and, uh, definitely don't say anything.  
  
"Yes, I know," I muttered, keeping hold of the door frame to brace myself in the corner.  
  
He stayed standing, punching in the code to deactivate the cloaking mechanism. Then he accepted the call, a vid screen in the console flicking to life with Howard's picture in the center. "Hey, old man, what's the word?"  
  
I craned my neck to get a better look, and saw that the engineer I'd met aboard the PeaceMillion looked pretty much as he did then. He wore a loud pink shirt but now had shades that covered half his face.  
  
"Hey, Duo, just checkin' in. You know, you never call me anymore. I'm beginning to feel neglected."  
  
Duo snorted a laugh. "Yeah, whatever, dude. Like you've missed me bangin' around your satellite even a little bit."  
  
Howard shrugged, and I could see where Duo had developed a few of his mannerisms. "I admit the quiet has been nice. I've also enjoyed the piles of dismantled engine parts _not_ tripping me up in every spare bit of space you could find. I like unobstructed corridors."  
  
"Yeah, yeah. You just want the extra quiet time with your new lady. But come on; what's up?" Leaning over the console, he cracked every one of the toes on his right foot, rolling them back and forth over the carpeted floor.  
  
Howard pushed his glasses up to rest on his bald forehead, and Duo's foot froze. "Just makin' sure you're still on schedule, that you'll be here by 22:00. I gotta check up on you these days, Duo. You spend so much time on that ship."  
  
He laughed again. "Mind if I call you 'Mom,' Howard? Seriously, don't worry about me. I'll see you tonight, okay?"  
  
The old man gave him a warm, fond smile. "Okay. Travel safely."  
  
Duo touched the screen. "Hey, guess I should ask how you are, huh? You doin' okay?"  
  
"Oh, I'm fine. Don't worry."  
  
"Right. Good. See ya, Howard."  
  
"Bye, Duo."  
  
With that, the conversation ended, the screen going dark. Still uneasy, I watched Duo reactivate the cloaking system. He stayed hunched over the console for several more seconds, fists clenched.  
  
"Duo?" I began, preparing to push off the wall. "Is -- "  
  
"Stay there," he growled.  
  
"Was there something wrong? He seemed relaxed enough."  
  
"Just stay there," he said again, abruptly turning and shoving himself out of the cockpit.  
  
I did as he said and waited, listening to him rooting through a storage compartment beside the bunks. I heard chains clinking and a few frustrated grunts, then the sound of a fist striking something soft. I went to the doorway and stuck my head around the frame, looking into the main room of the ship, finding Duo in front of what looked to be a relatively new punching bag, securely attached to both the ceiling and floor. His gaze snapped to mine but then back to the task he'd given himself -- which appeared to be breaking in the new punching bag. He attacked it with all the wild ferocity he'd had as a pilot. Raw skill ran hand in hand with instinct. He didn't hold himself like an experienced fighter, but his movements were precise, though erratic. He punched and swiped and kicked and snarled, but he did it without any preparation, without any stretching. His timing and the angle of his attacks indicated that he knew how to fight to maximize the effect of his strikes, but he was clearly letting off steam. He was going to hurt himself.  
  
I stepped into the room.  
  
"Stay away from me," he gritted.  
  
"Tell me what happened, Duo."  
  
He spun and swung the side of his arm into the bag. "He put his glasses up; that's what happened."  
  
"So?"  
  
"So, that means we're not going to L2."  
  
My heart sank. "You're sure."  
  
He barked a laugh and stopped the swaying bag between his shaking hands. "Yes, I'm fucking sure. Glasses up means we're fucked. Means they beat us to him, whoever 'they' fucking are -- Preventers, thugs, how the fuck should I know? Glasses up means 'abort,' 'deal's off,' 'head for the hills,' hit the fucking road and don't look back." He wrapped his arms further around the bag, holding onto it like it was keeping him upright. "You know what else it means? No cash from my old accounts, no food, no supplies. It means we gotta get'em from somewhere else, which means dropping our cover, landing and accessing money electronically, leaving a nice trail of breadcrumbs wherever we go. It means everything I did to be ready was all for nothing." He squeezed his eyes shut. "It means I didn't do anything for you but make it worse."  
  
"Duo..." I tried, approaching him from the side, grabbing the bag just below where he held it. He didn't open his eyes, but shoved hard, pushing the bag into my chest and forcing me off balance. I braced against the wall to keep from bumping into it. "Duo, we have to think about what this means for you."  
  
Pale eyelids lifted to reveal pained blue. "It means I fucked Howard, too. They were already there, in his home, because of me."  
  
"It also means we have to consider the possibility that you are as much a target as I am -- and not just the best way of getting to me."  
  
"Nnnngh," he growled, shaking his head, eyes squeezed shut.  
  
"You were followed when you left _Scythe_ in the mountains. They knew you'd be traveling to Howard's after you left Earth. You've been under surveillance, Duo. Even if it is still just about finding me, we can't assume that any contacts you have are safe anymore. We have to be -- "  
  
He shoved the bag again and choked, " _Shut up_!"  
  
"You can scream about it if you want to," I said, perhaps cruelly. "Now's the time to do it. Then we have to think."  
  
So he did. He hugged the bag close and buried his face between it and his arm. Then he yelled as loud as I'd ever heard him. It was long and only partially muffled. It hurt my ears and, watching him, his face turned bright red. His shoulders shook when he started to run out of air, and he abruptly stopped to suck in a long shuddering breath. Letting go of the punching bag, he took a couple steps back, then slowly sank to the floor, propping his elbows on his knees, putting his face in his hands.  
  
I lowered myself in front of him, and he spoke, voice difficult to hear from under his fingers. "I don't want to hear it from you right now, Wufei. I don't want to hear how I fucked up."  
  
I ran my fingers through my newly cropped hair. None of it was long enough to grab onto and tug. Duo hadn't shaved it, but it was a near thing. "I'm almost glad you did," I said.  
  
Duo's gaze lifted up to mine, and he waited without breathing.  
  
"Until right now, I've felt half-asleep, like I was drifting. Since I woke up in the hospital, really, I haven't been fully present for anything. I chose to come with you when I took out those two Preventers, but you'd already done all the hard work for me. You'd already planned everything. Now we have to figure it out from the beginning. And I'll gladly do that with you. We'll figure it out together."  
  
He started breathing again, nodding and dropping his eyes.  
  
"We'll find a way to contact Howard to make sure he's okay. He can probably still send your money to another account, one we set up."  
  
He nodded again, rubbing a hand in his eyes. "I never figured you for the consoling, reassuring type."  
  
"I don't want to be angry about this. I don't want to blame you. If you'd like me to be upset, I'm sure I could work up to it."  
  
"No, no, that's okay."  
  
Then, because I was feeling the equalization of our positions quite acutely, I shifted a little closer so that our knees touched. I mirrored his position, elbows on knees, chin in hands. The symmetry felt right.


	18. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

We took a weekend, drove to Provo.  
The snow was white and fluffy.  
But a weekend in Utah won't fix what's wrong with us.  
The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me.  
_\- "The Mess Inside" Mountain Goats_

"Ugh, I am so sick of field rations, I'd take that slop they fed you dirt-side at this point."  
  
He called this to me from the cockpit, and I envisioned him leaning back in his chair - feet on the console, hand sticky with a protein bar - as clearly as if I were there with him. I glared at the punching bag in front of me. "Well, if we could _land_ this thing without getting arrested, I'm sure we could find you something similar." I pictured him glowering and licking glue-like bits of puffed oats off his fingers. I glared a little harder at the punching bag and then pushed myself away from it, unable to take what I considered to be our collective frustration out upon it.  
  
Duo had told me, when he'd calmed down a bit and after we'd left L2 behind, that just after he'd left Hilde and gone to live with Howard, Heero had given the bag to him, claiming that Duo wouldn't get enough exercise to keep up his war-time fighting abilities, traveling so much in _Scythe_. Duo had firmly told him that our 'war-time fighting abilities' were kept up by chemicals and a training regimen that would have killed anyone over 22, so he was glad to leave both behind him. We'd been grateful for the thing at first, when we'd been close enough to the moon to still have enough gravity to use it. But now, cooped up in a tiny ship for a week with only emergency rations, recycled water, each other, and a sense of constant pursuit to keep us occupied, we'd both come to resent the stupid thing and how _not_ useful it had become.  
  
In Heero's absence, I'd tried to keep up with my rehabilitation exercises. The punching bag hadn't been ideal for training, especially not gradual muscle strengthening. My body needed to recover, not be tested. However, the ship's small living space wasn't big enough for the long form of my family's Chen style. And now, tumbling aimlessly through the small cabin, I couldn't have done it even had there been enough room. I thought that I was probably ready for all 81 forms, and that going through the whole thing would have done wonders for my peace of mind, but even once we reached L4, I couldn't see myself attempting it with Duo so close by.  
  
There was nothing inherently private about a fighting style. Indeed, a fighting style's purpose was to engage others. It was made to be used on enemies. But I didn't like the idea of Duo seeing it. I would have shown it to Heero if he'd asked, but it wasn't for a lover to see. I wasn't interested in protecting family secrets - my family was dead - I was just uncomfortable. About a great many things. So, I glared at the punching bag and did somersaults between the bunks and table.  
  
And I complained.  
  
"Tell me again how you know that the same thing isn't going to happen when we make contact with the Maganacs. How do you know that whoever's after us isn't already there ahead of us?"  
  
I heard him moodily twist about in his seat. "My answer hasn't changed since the last time you asked me. I'm still not positive about anything."  
  
I bumped up against the ceiling and shifted so my feet were flat against it. "Yes, but we've reached L4 territory." I tried crawling a few paces, but the force of my hands pressing on the ceiling pushed me back down again. "My question is becoming critical."  
  
He appeared in the doorway, clinging to the side and digging the last sticky bite of protein bar out of the wrapper with his tongue. "You're just gonna have to trust me," he said between licks."Or trust providence, or whatever, 'cause if we can't hook up with the Maganacs, then... well then we gotta try to land another way. We're not stocked for deep space travel."  
  
I pushed off the ceiling with my feet and caught myself on the floor with outstretched hands. My back twinged, letting me know it didn't like the way I was stretching and twisting, even though it didn't feel like I was putting any strain on it. "You're right. The answer hasn't gotten any better since you last said it."  
  
Duo balled up the empty wrapper and threw it in a corner. It sailed slowly into the wall and stuck there. I glared at it and then up at him, only to find him giving me the kind of once-over that signified lascivious intentions. Considering he'd never looked at me like that before, not even when he _had_ lascivious intentions, I figured he was trying to distract me.  
  
"Hey, shirtless sweating guy." He said it with a sort of sarcastic admiration, though I knew that he did like the way I looked.  
  
I glared up at him, still upside-down. "What. I'm not in the mood for - "  
  
"Anyone ever tell ya you got a slammin' body?"  
  
By reflex I looked down - or up or who the hell knew? - at my chest and torso, at my denim-covered legs and bare feet. I was still too thin by my standards, but I took the compliment, flipping myself upright to give him a better view of what he liked.  
  
"Yes," I answered truthfully.  
  
Duo grinned. "Well then, I should congratulate them on their fine taste." He made a show of dragging his eyes from toe to chest.  
  
"That won't be necessary. Or possible at this point. You didn't like him very much anyway."  
  
I felt like a child then, testing and pushing to see what I could get away with. Duo took my words like a slap in the face. He jerked back a little as though he had been struck, and I fought to keep from looking away, frustrated and embarrassed. His initial shock gave way to embarrassment, too, then curiosity as he realized he'd stumbled into something private, something from that blanked out spot between his first efforts at friendship right after the wars and the closeness we now shared.  
  
For my part, I remembered the feel of Karl's warm wet skin under my hands, his hips hard to grab onto under the spray of the showers. When I had been able to catch hold of him, he'd been wiry and slim. Those times were when he slept, when we broke the rules or when we were quarantined together with the flu. It was only then that I ever held him in any meaningful sense. I thought of him now as loose-jointed, bending himself in as many directions as he cared to, for reasons, if beyond bald self interest, I had yet to figure out.  
  
Duo looked at me as though realizing and recognizing that all the places he'd touched had already belonged to someone, somewhere else. I wondered if he'd really thought that I'd never been with another person before, if he'd thought that what we'd done was the first encounter I'd had with sex. I was pretty certain I hadn't been his first, though I wasn't sure whether he'd been with someone of the same sex before me.  
  
We looked each other over, and my experience, however limited, was now a barrier - something else that'd he'd missed and that I wouldn't share. "We're not so different, though," I said, startling both him and myself. "Whatever it may look like, I don't think that we are." The little I knew about L2 led me to believe that he had grown up with the sorts of power games and cruelty I knew from RCNP.  
  
He nodded, though I didn't get the sense it was because he agreed with me. Then he shook himself, lifting his eyes up from where they had been fixed on my chest. "No, probably not. And, uh, if it makes you feel any better about our chances, the Maganacs have also become outlaws of a sort."  
  
That sentence ended much differently than I thought it would, given its beginning and what we'd just been discussing. So I jerked myself back to the more important task at hand and firmly pushed aside concern for any damage I might have just done to the new, still-fragile thing between Duo and me.  
  
"The Maganacs have the same technology I do," he continued, "so they'll be a lot harder for the guys on our tail to find than Howard was."  
  
"Haven't they always been like that, though? They've been on the outskirts for - "  
  
"Yeah, well, I guess before Quatre died, they'd settled down a bit on L4 to look after him. After he was gone, they had no reason to stay."  
  
Trying to remember the blur that had been my trial and conviction, I couldn't recall any of them hanging around when I'd been staying with Quatre.  
  
"So anyway, they've been here, there, and everywhere for the last three years, and if you wanna talk to'em, they gotta find you."  
  
"Which is why we've been sitting here waiting for the last 24 hours?"  
  
"You got it. They know we're here; I'm betting they're waiting to see if anyone else's come along with us."  
  
Now that I'd stopped exerting myself, tumbling around the ship, I shivered and hugged my arms. "I'd better make myself presentable then, just to be ready when they show up."  
  
"...Yeah," Duo finally answered before turning back toward the cockpit.

+

When the proximity sensor finally whined above our heads, we were both sleeping, or at least trying to. The alarm jolted me out of a fitful, unpleasant dream and sent Duo tumbling off the top bunk. He managed to right himself midair and then scrubbed his hands over his face as he forced himself to wake up.  
  
"Is that the Maganacs, or a carrier about to run us over?" I croaked, pulling myself upright by the handholds mounted into the wall.  
  
On his way to the cockpit, he called back, "Should be them. I picked these coordinates as a meeting place to avoid the other thing."  
  
I rolled my eyes, already aware of that, and reached for the flexible soft-shoes tucked under the mattress. Since yesterday, Duo had decided to ignore all my attempts at either humor or sarcasm. Making my way toward the cockpit, I heard an impressive string of curses and tensed up, readying myself for something similar to what had happened with Howard. But then I heard him laugh and realized he was relieved. I drifted into the cockpit to see him clinging to the console, grinning out at the stars just as, to our port, a mid-size ship materialized out of the blackness of space. A moment later the communicator chirped a request to open a line and Duo immediately accepted it, distractedly waving me back out of the room, just as the screen flickered to life. I hadn't caught who was on the other end of the line, but Duo answered that question before the person had time to speak.  
  
"Shit, am I glad to see your face, Rashid. Sure took ya long enough; I been sittin' here with my thumb up my ass for two days."  
  
"Just you, Duo?" Rashid asked warily.  
  
"Just me, man," he answered. I rolled my eyes again. "Requesting permission to dock with your crew for a few days for some major restocking. In fact, you guys got anything fresh on that hunk-a-junk? I just want a goddamn orange."  
  
Rashid's laugh rumbled through the whole ship. "Permission granted. It's good to see you again, Duo."  
  
"Yeah, you too, man. All right, I'm comin' in. We can chat then."  
  
I stuck my head around the corner to see us approaching the ship's belly, its hangar door sliding back. Duo guided us in with a steady hand, dropping the landing gear and following the tracks of yellow lines inside the bay to a spot near the door. We touched down just as the door closed behind us and the bay re-pressurized. Duo's hand hesitated over the console.  
  
"No use keepin' the engine running, right? If this goes sour, we're stuck here anyway."  
  
"Looks like," I answered.  
  
"Alright then, fuck it." With a few quick commands, he powered down the computer, then pushed away from the console, stretching his arms over his head as though he'd been hunched forward in his chair for hours. He was nervous.  
  
"I'm going out there with you, right?" I asked. "You haven't decided I should stay here as a stowaway until you've determined it's safe. Right?"  
  
He huffed a quiet laugh and hugged his arms, rubbing them briskly against the chill. "I can't protect you. I was stupid to think I could. And if we _are_ fucked, putting myself between you and them isn't gonna make a damn bit of difference."  
  
I nodded, agreeing with him. "Let's go, then."  
  
"Yeah," he confirmed, grabbing up his wrist remote and sliding it on. He lengthened the strap and pushed the thing further up his arm until it rested just below his elbow. Then he tugged his sleeve down to cover it. I let him lead the way to the hatch, but as he punched the release to lower the ramp I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.  
  
"Thank you for bringing me this far and for giving me the opportunity to finish what I started," I said in a rush. He paused, waiting, and then frowned, opening his mouth to reply. "And thanks for wanting to finish it with me," I added.  
  
His frown lightened and he flushed. I did too, and he hit the release before either of us could say anything else, the floor dropping out from under us in a gradual ramp to the hangar. And even though he'd said it wouldn't do any good, he put himself between them and me anyway, taking the lead and emerging out to the bright lights of the hangar. We found the big room empty and so stayed close to Duo's ship, keeping it at our backs in case it turned out to be the only cover we had.  
  
"Hello?" Duo finally called. "Anybody home? What the hell kinda welcome is this?"  
  
We both tensed and edged closer together when a side door slid open and several figures filed in. They clung to the side ropes along the wall and then pushed off the floor, propelling themselves across the bay, towards Duo's ship. They expertly redirected themselves partway across, pushing off a raised maintenance platform in the middle of the hangar, and landed in front of us, steadying themselves before facing us directly. They were dressed traditionally, not for space travel, wearing loose-fitting pants tucked into boots, with sashes around their waists and open vests over loose, cream-colored shirts. One of them wore sunglasses, several of them red fezzes. Eventually Rashid pushed forward out of the small cluster of men, towering over all of us.  
  
"Yo," Duo offered, stepping up to meet him.  
  
"Duo," he greeted, eyes quickly traveling past him to me. He inclined his head in a small bow. "And Chang Wufei. It's good to see that you are actually joining us."  
  
I returned the bow. "That's a relief."  
  
"Yeah, no one else was hoping we'd join you, were they?" Duo asked peering around Rashid and the group of Maganacs behind him.  
  
"You mean aside from the rest of us?" one of the men piped up, the one with the sun glasses.  
  
"Aside from the rest of you," Duo confirmed.  
  
"Well, anyone who's wanted to find us these last few years appears to be looking a little harder, if that's what you mean. Does that have anything to do with you?" Rashid was looking at me and not looking at me, his eyes focused just to my right. He was looking at my ear, I realized. I resisted the urge to cover it and instead scratched my hand through my hair, momentarily distracting myself with the feel of my palm against short hair and scalp.  
  
"Oh, it surely does," Duo said, grinning. "And as long as none of them are stowed aboard this ship someplace, we promise not to get you guys too involved. We don't want trouble; we just want to get to L4."  
  
"We're already involved, especially if we aid you in your effort to investigate Quatre's death." Rashid turned to me. "And we are happy to help you in this. Wufei, he cared for you a great deal at the end. His connection with you was one of the closest I'd ever seen."  
  
I started a bit, instantly uncomfortable. "I fear it was the death of him," I murmured. I felt Duo's surprised gaze, but didn't return it. "I should never have burdened him with my problems when he was unwell."  
  
"Nonsense!" one of the men shouted, and Rashid nodded in agreement. "He chose to help you. Everything he did for you, he did because he wanted to. It means a lot to us that you would come back for him."  
  
"I..." Without warning, my throat closed on emotions I hadn't acknowledged since before I entered RCNP. There had only been that one week for me to process and put away what had happened. Quatre was dead and I'd had seven days to deal with that before going to a place where I did not have the luxury of grieving. I finally met Duo's gaze, and as I anticipated, he was looking right back at me with open confusion and curiosity. "We'll do our best," I finished, not looking away from him. Duo hesitated, then dipped his chin in a faint nod.  
  
"We'll get you to L4 tomorrow, on one of our shuttles," Rashid finally said after the silence had grown heavy. "First, though, you should get some rest. It's the middle of night, whether you can tell or not. There are two spare bunks in the main cabin. We all sleep together, so we hope you don't mind a few snorers."  
  
One of the men laughed, and I smiled. Since my admittance to the hospital, I hadn't slept as well without the sounds of others around me breathing and shifting about. It would be comforting to know, to see, that Duo and I were no longer alone in space, with only a pocket of oxygen and a layer of steel between us and quick suffocation.  
  
"We don't mind," Duo answered for me.

+

The commotion of meeting up and docking with the Maganacs made it difficult to go right to sleep, no matter how tired I was. Space travel, even though the physical demands appeared minimal, was actually quite draining. Lethargy and weakness went hand in hand. I lay in the bunk bolted to the wall, staring up at the bunk a few feet above me. It held someone I didn't know who'd already been asleep when I pulled myself into bed and patted down the velcro strips on the blanket edges. Duo's bunk was in the middle of the room, the third one up from the floor. He'd said only a terse good night when we parted.  
  
He scared the shit out of me when his head suddenly appeared by my hand. He floated by the bed and hissed my name. "Hey, Wu, you awake?"  
  
I took a steadying breath. "Yes, and I probably won't be sleeping for the rest of the night, thanks."  
  
"Yeah, sorry," he whispered. "I didn't want to wake up anyone, calling up to you. Can I talk to you for a bit?"  
  
I started to sit up. "Of course."  
  
He was having trouble staying on the bunk. He hooked his legs underneath but that only tipped him forward. He grabbed hold of the blanket and tried to hold himself down, but he couldn't seem to get comfortable. Twice he squeezed my knee - I was sure - accidentally. I peeled back the blanket and winced as the velcro pulled apart, loud in the relative quiet of the cabin.  
  
"Just lie down with me," I whispered.  
  
He nodded, "Thanks," sliding under the blanket beside me and then sealing us both in again. With the blanket tight over us, we could almost forget the complete absence of gravity. He stayed on his back, folding his hands behind his head and staring up at the bunk above us.  
  
"What did you want to talk about?" I asked, though I could have ventured a guess.  
  
"Why didn't you tell me Quatre was sick when he died?"  
  
I closed my eyes. "He... wasn't really sick."  
  
"But you said he was unwell." I heard his hair slide on the pillow as he turned to look at me.  
  
"That's true; he wasn't well. His heart was weak. It made his body weak."  
  
"His space heart?"  
  
"Yeah. No one really knew what to do for him. His empathy was growing stronger all the time, for the people he cared about."  
  
"So when you stayed with him during your trial..."  
  
I nodded. "That's when it got really bad. He felt everything I felt; it made him... feverish and scattered. He couldn't stay still. But when I tried to leave him, to convince him that I could handle things on my own, he wouldn't let me. He grew even more agitated. It was like a feedback loop that only he could feel until I was able to accept his help, until I could control my own emotions. Then he was better."  
  
Duo was silent beside me.  
  
"Defending me... It wasn't something he should have done. Stressful emotional situations severely weakened him. But thinking that way, not wanting to burden him, I only made it worse."  
  
"How were you able to accept his help?"  
  
I swallowed hard. "I didn't really have any choice. Though, now, even after everything that happened, whatever part I may have had in it, I'm glad that I did."

+

 _"Quatre, I'm the one doing this to you; you're not well because of me! I won't be responsible for - just please sit down. You're only making it worse!"_  
  
_Quatre had stripped down to his undershirt, and the white fabric stuck to his pale shuddering chest. His white-blond hair clung to his face and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. He sank down into a chair and rubbed at his breastbone, his fingers shaking._  
  
_"I'm going to call for your doctor. Stay there. Try to relax. Breath through your nose." Wufei turned to leave the hotel room, reached for the door handle, and hesitated when he heard that desperate voice, gasping and reedy and full of holes._  
  
_"No, don't go. It'll... it'll only get worse. Stay with me."_  
  
_He turned back around. "Then where is your medicine? Is it in the bathroom? Why have you not taken any?"_  
  
_Quatre leaned back in the chair, arms gripping the plush sides, expanding his ribs upward, trying to open up his airways. "They make me sleep," he gasped. "I don't want to sleep right now. I want to be awake. Just stay with me, Wufei. Share this with me."_  
  
_"Share what?" Wufei shouted striding back into the room. "I don't know how to help you. And I certainly don't want your help if it does this to you!" He approached Quatre as though he were a skittish wild animal. Pale blue irises were almost entirely swallowed by dilated pupils. Wufei reached down to feel for the boy's pulse and found it thrumming under his fingers like a bird's. Quatre pushed his chest further up at Wufei's touch. Wufei jerked back and scowled. "Get a hold of yourself!"_  
  
_Limp, moist fingers circled around his wrist and Quatre wheezed noisily as he struggled to sit up. "It's never been like this before. I feel... I feel like I'm you... you and the others, Duo and Heero and Trowa. I'm all of you."_  
  
_Wufei felt real fear then. Would Quatre's heart burst? Was he, after all this, about to die? He knelt down in front of him. "What do you need me to do if you don't want your doctor or your medicine?"_  
  
_"Hold onto me. Touch me here." He pressed his hand over his heart and Wufei reached out to cover small bony fingers with his own. Quatre rested his other hand on Wufei's shoulder and drew him forward into a loose embrace. Wufei realized that Quatre was holding him with all his strength. Then he swallowed sixteen years of fierce, uncompromising upbringing and pulled Quatre tight against him. With one arm he held him close. He pressed his other hand over the fluttering, erratic heartbeat between them._  
  
_Quatre stilled in his arms with a shuddering sob. He was warm to the touch, warm and damp with sweat. He breathed hot little puffs of air against Wufei's neck. "I don't think I can do this for much longer. We have to act quickly."_

+

I blinked and watched a tiny bead of moisture float away from my right eye. I blinked again and another lifted from my left cheek.  
  
"He was more devastated than I was when the verdict didn't go our way. He went back to L4 to recover, to be away from me, and the next time I saw him, I was with you, and he was dead. He was still warm. We'd missed him by maybe fifteen minutes." Duo knew that last part as well as I, but it was still difficult to accept.  
  
I turned to see that Duo had rolled over onto his side, now directly facing me. "Wu - "  
  
"If we hadn't eaten lunch before we went to see him, we wouldn't have missed him. We could have taken him to a hospital. They would have pumped his stomach."  
  
"Wu, what kind of medication did he take?"  
  
I met Duo's gaze. It was dark enough that I couldn't discern the color of his eyes. "They were basically sleeping pills."  
  
"Were they what was in his system when we found him?"  
  
I nodded.  
  
"Why didn't you tell me?"  
  
"Because his health was a private matter."  
  
"This changes everything. How could they have declared it a suicide, when accidental overdose would have meant something entirely different? Wouldn't that have been better than suicide? How could anyone know for sure?"  
  
"The amount of the drug in his system essentially ruled out an accidental overdose. There was so much of it in him, it had to have been deliberate."  
  
Duo shifted closer. His hand slid across the sheet to take hold of my wrist. "Did the others know? About his heart?"  
  
"I don't know. We've managed to avoid talking about it this long."  
  
He was silent for several seconds. "I don't know whether this makes the whole thing more or less tragic, knowing that he was already unhealthy."  
  
"It's worse," I answered. "He wanted more than anything to be able to help me. But every time I saw him, he was nearly crippled. I had to be as invested in my case as he was in order for him to be able to function. I had to hope as hard as he did and believe in him as much as he believed in my innocence. Any unevenness in our emotions sent him into a fit. When he died, I was left alone with all those emotions, the ones that he had needed, the ones that I'd felt for him."  
  
"You loved him," Duo murmured.  
  
"I had to."

+

After the second Eve War, the Maganacs settled on Quatre's home colony to keep a closer eye on him. They were never taken on as Winner Security, but Rashid and the other men who'd stayed with him when the fighting stopped moved into the neighborhood and remained close friends of Quatre's. They didn't see each other as regularly, but they kept close watch on the Winner heir's activities and acquaintances. Quatre didn't mind their attention. As his empathic abilities grew more focused and powerful, and as his heart weakened over the span of only a few months, he was comforted and reassured by the presence of the men who'd adopted him as part of their family. In the final months of his life, they were a sort of shadow security for him. They kept watch and they kept track. They also kept a log of his scheduled appointments and meetings, which proved very useful to us.  
  
"Oh, shit."  
  
I looked up from Duo's laptop to find him flailing upright from where he'd been floating above the main table in the ship's galley, reading the Maganac's electronic log. "What is it? Did you find something?"  
  
"Pull up Dilawar Said's file. You know, the L4, speak Arabic in the community guy?"  
  
From where I sat at the table, legs hooked under my chair, his pinwheeling arms looked rather comical. He didn't have anything to push off from, so I caught one of his wrists and pulled him down into an adjacent chair, saving him the trouble of figuring out how to create friction where there was none.  
  
"Thanks, buddy," he grunted, settling himself into the chair and then slapping down the log he'd just been sifting through. In his excitement, he'd accidentally clicked it a few months ahead of where he wanted it, so before he could point out what he intended to show me, he had to get back to the correct month, which turned out to be July. Then he stabbed his finger at the day of Tuesday, July 6th.  
  
I looked where he pointed and saw the entry 'Dilawar, 17:30.' "Yes, and? I feel relatively secure in saying that there is more than one Dilawar residing in the L4 colony cluster."  
  
"Look at that date a little harder."  
  
The day wasn't so important as the month and the year. July of AC 197 was a busy time for all of us. Heero and Trowa had passed their exams and had been instated as full Preventer agents. Duo was busy juggling a breakup with Hilde and regular trips to Earth. I was about to start my three-year sentence at RCNP and Quatre was contemplating suicide.  
  
"This is where you want to start," I said, "a week before Quatre dies."  
  
"And four days before Dilawar Said gets the shit kicked out of him and falls into a coma he never wakes up from."  
  
"Seems as good a place to start as any."  
  
"Seems better than most."  
  
"You know, just because we were able to safely meet up with the Maganacs doesn't mean whoever's tailing us won't be waiting for us on L4. The chances of us getting into Quatre's old office, let alone his home, are very small."  
  
Duo hadn't taken his eyes off the electronic planner. "That's probably true, but I bet they don't know about Dilawar."  
  
I wasn't sure about even that, but I understood and shared the urgency Duo felt. We didn't have much time to figure out any of this. We could try to disappear on L4 - it was a densely populated colony - but we didn't look like most of the people who lived there. And, where we were going, the similarities were even fewer beyond mere appearances. We wouldn't be able to stay hidden for long. But as much as we wanted to solve this thing we'd set out for ourselves, I knew that Duo was just as, if not more concerned with what would happen to me when we were caught. He was hoping that whatever light we could shed on this case would be enough to serve as a bargaining chip for my safety. If it wasn't, then everything he'd done would have only made my situation worse. And whatever the two of us shared now would not survive that.

+

"I really don't like leaving _Scythe_ behind like this." Duo's shoulder brushed mine as we walked through the shuttle terminal, jammed in with hundreds of other travelers. He had his braid tucked down inside a hooded sweatshirt, and with the hood up, he looked like any number of moody teenagers annoyed by the crowd. With hunched posture and a pair of thick-framed glasses that Duo had procured from the seemingly endless depths of his duffel, I hoped that I looked similar. Fortunately the lenses didn't have a prescription, but wearing them, I was still reminded of my schooling back on L5.  
  
The forged documents Duo had handed over to the harried customs official - I didn't want to know where he got them, so I hadn't asked - had gotten us through without a hitch and with the crush of people all around us, it appeared that we would make it down to the main ring of the colony unhindered. Without knowing who exactly was looking for us, the concern of whether Preventers or some other government agents would be waiting for us at the terminal gate went back and forth between real fear and paranoia. We were both wanted criminals on Earth; however, it remained to be seen whether the people who - we assumed - were after us for escaping from the hospital were the same people who'd trailed Duo when he'd been preparing to spring me. If they were the same, then it was likely that nothing we could discover here on L4 would help us.  
  
"It's not like we could have brought it along with us," I grumbled. "Your ship is much safer where it is."  
  
Our successful entrance to the colony was doubtless aided by the fact that we'd arrived on the shuttle the Maganacs used for their above-ground business deals. They sold mining equipment to one of the Winner-owned resource satellites, and it was to their company that Howard was finally able to wire the money Duo had cashed out from his accounts. That money would pay for our stay here, since we couldn't very well rely on the Maganacs to put us up in one of their homes in Quatre's neighborhood.  
  
"Yeah, but the Maganac shuttle was a one-way ticket."  
  
"Isn't that what we intended?" I pushed the glasses further up on my nose.  
  
He shrugged. "Makes me nervous not havin' a real exit strategy."  
  
"Our exit strategy is solving the case - proving that Dilawar Said, Quatre Winner, Benjamin Bennett, and Vasil Wasyliw were all killed as part of some planet and colony-wide conspiracy to eliminate dangerous war leaders - thereby proving, if not our innocence, then at least our usefulness to an intelligence organization like Preventers. We might even figure out who tried to kill me and who tailed you if we solve the first part."  
  
Beside me, Duo laughed bitterly. "You're right. It's as clear as day to me now."  
  
"Good. I'm glad. Is that the train station?"  
  
Duo raised his head. "Yeah. Auda said it'd be down in the lower part of the terminal on the Eastern side."  
  
Not wanting to appear too obvious, Auda, our escort, had docked the Maganac shuttle the next quadrant down from where Quatre and Dilawar had lived. When we left the shuttle, Duo and I split from him, deciding to take the train through the lower ring of the colony. It was shorter than finding our way on the upper level and might buy us a bit of time against anyone waiting for us to turn up in Quatre's quadrant. When we did arrive, we would find our own accommodations so that if anyone questioned Auda as to our whereabouts, he wouldn't know.  
  
As we settled into our seats for the three-hour ride, I could see Duo's hooded eyes sliding from one passenger to the next, assessing and memorizing each one. When the train started off down its track, we sagged against each other, affecting a loose, sleepy posture. But for the entire ride, our eyes stayed open to slits.


	19. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

We went down to New Orleans  
one weekend in the Spring.  
Looked hard for what we'd lost.  
It was painful to admit it, but we couldn't find a thing.  
_\- "The Mess Inside" Mountain Goats  
_  
"When we get out of this, when we see Howard again, I am going to make him his favorite dinner - from scratch, with all fresh ingredients."  
  
"What's his favorite dinner?"  
  
Duo swiped the key card to our room and pushed open the door when the lock disengaged. "Jamaican jerk chicken. I have no idea how to make it, but by God, I will figure it out, because I owe him big time for this."  
  
The money that showed up in the Maganacs' account had done considerable work to loosen Duo back up after we'd been forced to skip L2. Howard had done business with the Maganacs before - according to Duo, it was some time during my first year at RCNP - so the money transfer shouldn't have been in the least bit suspicious. Or at least, if anyone was watching Howard, it shouldn't have thrown up any red flags. That's what Duo said, but I figured there were probably enough red flags up around all the people Duo had been in contact with before he'd sprung me from the hospital. No more were needed.  
  
Duo tossed the duffel, our only luggage, onto the bed furthest from the door. "Wanna get some shuteye before we head out? The night cycle is pretty far along."  
  
I nodded. "It'd be better to approach Dilawar's sister in as non-threatening a manner as possible. Daylight would be better for that."  
  
"Yeah. Okay then, mind if I take the bathroom first?"  
  
I shook my head and he grunted a thank you, taking his kit in with him and shutting the door.  
  
I gave the room a quick once over, feeling along the walls and behind the curtains for anything out of the ordinary. It was highly unlikely that anyone could have beaten us here to plant bugs or cameras, but in my experience, it paid to be paranoid. The room had two double beds, and I tossed the blankets and mattress of the one closer to the door. Unsurprisingly, I found nothing. When the shower continued to run, I checked over the other bed, wondering whether Duo would want to sleep together or separately. _Scythe_ hadn't had a big enough space for us to be together comfortably, so we'd each taken a bunk. The same had been true on the Maganac's ship, though even if there had been room, I didn't think Duo would have made such a statement about our relationship in front of so many others. I wouldn't have wanted to either.  
  
But beyond simple space constraints, since the scare with Howard and after I'd revealed a bit more about what Karl had been to me, Duo had taken a sizable step back. I suspected it was because he hated being surprised. His affection was still there in the way he almost touched my back when we walked together or when he leaned close to murmur some sarcastic observation, but these inclinations embarrassed him now. He didn't know what to do with them. And I wasn't much help.  
  
He finally emerged from the bathroom, damp and grinning. His hair was clean and pulled back in a loose knot at the base of his skull. When he stood by the bed with his duffel on it, he dropped his pile of clothes to the floor with obvious triumph. He looked at me and laughed.  
  
"Isn't gravity the _best_? Look, they're staying exactly where they fell!" He pointed, and then, to demonstrate, he bent to pick up his shirt and drop it again.  
  
"I would have thought you were used to zero gravity with all the traveling you do."  
  
He gave a full body shiver. "That was longer than usual, man. And I'd gotten spoiled hangin' out on Earth with you there at the end."  
  
He rooted around in his bag and pulled out a clean pair of underwear, tugging them on underneath his towel. Then he let the towel drop, chuckling to himself as it too landed and stayed on the floor.  
  
"You'd be a cheap date if you're this easy to please," I said, smiling.  
  
He pulled on a new t-shirt, speaking after he'd worked the collar over his hair. "Hell, I don't even need dates. I find myself plenty amusing."  
  
I swallowed and pushed the words out of my mouth before I could convince myself that I didn't need to know where we stood. "What about a date with me? Would not even that be..." I trailed off, quickly losing both steam and courage as Duo's mouth quirked in an unsure grin. "...amusing enough?" I managed to finish.  
  
He scratched his elbow and huffed a short laugh.  
  
I felt my face get hot and abruptly stood, reaching for his duffel to grab my own kit and then run for the bathroom. Before I could make my escape, though, he slid sideways to close off the space between the two beds.  
  
"No one's ever asked me on a date before, you know."  
  
"That wasn't an invitation," I said, looking over his shoulder. "That was a question as to whether the pleasure of your own company was superior to mine."  
  
"I didn't even go on any dates with Hilde," he continued, undaunted.  
  
I met his eyes then. "Not even with Hilde?"  
  
He gave me a lopsided grin and gave the back of his neck a quick, sheepish rub. "No, I just moved in with her. We breezed right past that whole 'dating' phase."  
  
"Why? Girls love that phase, don't they?"  
  
He laughed again. "I'm not prepared to make that sort of generalization. I... I think I just shoved my way into her life because I wanted to be with someone. Dating never occurred to me."  
  
I raised an eyebrow at him and waited for that to sink in a bit further. "But she must have enjoyed your company a great deal."  
  
"She never said 'no,' but I probably didn't give her much of a chance to. Ha, well and then she kicked me out, kinda like you did." He gave a belated shrug.  
  
"I refuse to feel guilty about that, just so you know. Though I'll pay the rent money I owe you as soon as I have access to my savings again."  
  
He shrugged me off. "Whatever. Hey, I'm suddenly feeling a little depressed, here. Maybe you should take your shower now so you don't have to see it."  
  
I grabbed his bare elbow and leaned in to kiss him, even if he was realizing that he could be selfish and needy and oblivious. I didn't like him any less because of it. And he appeared willing to put up with me, despite all of my flaws and my readiness to point out his. I pushed my tongue into his mouth and hooked it against the backs of his teeth, and he grunted low in his throat tilting his head, opening his mouth against mine. Then he pulled back just far enough to speak, saying against my lips, "Go out with me? Let me buy you lunch and drive you home from school?"  
  
My stomach did a few flips. "That's ridiculous."  
  
"Ridiculously fun?"  
  
"Implausible, more like."  
  
"What's more likely to happen?"  
  
"When we're both finally out on parole, I'll kick your ass until it's routine, three times a week, and then maybe cook something for you afterwards."  
  
He leaned back to look at me, clearly skeptical. "Really?"  
  
"And when you can fight at a level that's not embarrassing to me, we can exercise that starved brain of yours. You can read your first novel. Aloud. To me." I let go of his elbow and sidestepped around him toward the bathroom. "I am perfectly capable of getting myself home from school, thanks, should I for some reason decide to keep going."  
  
"You're perfectly capable of reading on your own, too."  
  
"Shut up; this conversation has gone on far longer than necessary."

+

Dilawar Said had lived in what could only have been called a respectable neighborhood. The homes were clean and new, set close together, even though they were built in the traditional style of the culture - low and sprawling. We couldn't go to Dilawar's house because his family was gone, casualties of past Alliance cruelty. The Said family home now belonged to a new family. Dilawar's sister lived with her husband's family, so that was where we went.  
  
Asmaa Said did not answer the door when we knocked. Her older brother-in-law, who introduced himself as Nadir, brought us into their home. He took us through the house, introducing us to the nieces and nephews, the sisters and aunts, a set of grandparents, and finally the mother, who didn't say anything to us, but nodded her head, indicating her tolerance of our presence. Asmaa emerged from somewhere further inside the house, greeting us quietly and with not a small amount of suspicion. We kept our eyes lowered as she came closer. Looking at her sandaled feet, I felt rootless and blank. I couldn't even remember the feel of my mourning clothes, the tight tail at the back of neck or any of my extensive schooling with my masters. Everything in this house was ancient and I had no traditions of my own. I wondered how Duo felt.  
  
He spoke first, addressing Nadir. "We've come from Earth, Rome specifically, looking for the truth about the death of Asmaa's brother, Dilawar. We wanted to express our sincere regret for your loss, but we were hoping that she - or you - could tell us a bit more about him and about what happened to him."  
  
I wondered how much preparation he'd done for this meeting, whether he'd had to brush up on his etiquette, or whether he'd always known how to address practicing Muslim women. He'd never struck me as someone who worried if he was rude or not, but I knew that he also hated surprises.  
  
After a moment of awkward silence, during which Nadir and Asmaa may have had a silent conversation we couldn't see, Asmaa laughed. "You may address me directly, though thank you for your tact. We keep many traditions in this house, though not all of them. Before I talk to you about my brother, however, I would ask for your names."  
  
We both looked up then, and I could feel Duo relax a bit beside me. Then I bowed to her and gave her my real name, not the one on the documents that had gotten us onto the colony. "Chang Wufei."  
  
I half-expected Duo to extend his hand, but he didn't, instead giving her a short nod. "I'm Duo Maxwell."  
  
She smiled at him, though it came with a raised eyebrow. "I know who you are, Mr. Maxwell. Your face was all over the news a few years ago. You were quite the poster boy, though not the kind you hoped for, I'm sure."  
  
Duo grinned ruefully and shook his head, reflexively reaching under his braid to rub his neck. "No, ma'am. The cameras caught me on a bad day."  
  
Then she turned to me. "And I imagine, I've heard all about your deeds as well, though there hasn't been a face or a name to put with them. Do you mind if I ask which one of them you were?" Even then, even there, off-planet and in another person's home, I had to fight down the reaction I'd had for the last two years to any mention or questions concerning my involvement in the first Eve War. I'd always dealt with them quickly and loudly so that everyone knew the topic was not up for discussion. Asmaa would not have appreciated such a disrespectful reaction, and her brother-in-law certainly wouldn't have.  
  
"I came from L5," I said stiffly. "The part of it that's no longer there."  
  
"I see," she murmured, nodding her head in sympathy.  
  
It was quite the leap to make, assuming that the boy traveling with Duo Maxwell was another former pilot, but I didn't comment. If her brother's involvement in the war was anything to go by, then it seemed this family was more politically savvy than most. I already liked her quite a bit.  
  
"We came here with a pretty specific goal in mind, actually," Duo spoke up. "Could we talk with you privately about it?"  
  
At his forward tone, Nadir stiffened, but Asmaa turned to him and said something sharp in Arabic. The man then turned to scoop up one of the children crawling his way across the floor, pushing a toy truck ahead of him, and plopped him into Asmaa's arms. She hugged the surprised little boy close and then gestured for us to follow her into an adjacent room.  
  
It was clearly a child's bedroom. Several small people could have slept in the big bed in the corner. A brightly colored quilt covered it and that was where she sat, putting the boy back on the floor between us. Across the room from the bed, there were two small desks against the wall, with colored paper and crayons scattered across the top. We each took a chair, and when we were seated, she looked us over again with that shrewd, assessing gaze. "So, what specifically was it you wanted to know that you would come to my family's home when my husband is away at work?"  
  
We'd agreed before we left the hotel that Duo would do most of the talking. He was less intimidating and certainly more charming to anyone who appreciated such a trait. We'd also agreed to go straight to the heart of our questions, not wanting to waste any time feeling out Asmaa's willingness to talk. We figured she'd make it clear more or less from the beginning whether she had anything to say to us.  
  
"Asmaa, we want to know what sort of relationship your brother had with Quatre Winner, if or how they knew each other." Duo said it openly and earnestly, with wide serious eyes and posture that indicated his keen interest in her answer. She wasn't someone who struck me as particularly susceptible to charm, but she also appeared willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe she just really wanted to talk about her brother.  
  
Lines appeared by her eyes when her face twitched downward into a frown. "My brother knew lots of people in our community. Quatre Winner was an acquaintance."  
  
"But did they know each other?" Duo sat forward in his seat.  
  
She shrugged and looked down at the child spinning in a circle on his knees, running the truck along an imaginary road. "They would have been hard-pressed to avoid each other, but they didn't share many ideas. The only interest that overlapped for them was the preservation of our community, the strengthening of local bonds. They both cared about that equally, I think."  
  
"Was this part of your brother's effort to keep Arabic as a spoken language in this quadrant?"  
  
Asmaa gave him a wry smile. "You've been researching my brother's activities, have you?"  
  
Duo nodded, undaunted and unabashed. "We know he was a vocal critic of Alliance involvement with the colonies. We know he was part of the resistance before the war finally broke out. We want to know what was going on with him when he was killed."  
  
She nodded. "And what would that have to do with Quatre Winner?"  
  
"They died within a week of each other, and Quatre was supposed to meet Dilawar during that week, at least according to his schedule. Would it have been to talk Dilawar's language project?"  
  
She shook her head sharply, no. "It's true they both cared about their home, but they differed greatly as to how. Dilawar wanted to preserve an identity he saw as threatened. Quatre Winner wanted to bring the quadrant on board for something a bit more ambitious."  
  
"Like what?"  
  
"My brother said it was a sort of community watch organization but on an inter-colony scale with the populations assuming more responsibility for their own well-being, keeping closer watch for signs of unhappiness and unease."  
  
"Did Quatre want your brother to be a part of this?" Duo asked.  
  
"He wanted everyone to be a part of it, but Dilawar was a good representative for this area."  
  
"Would their meeting have been to talk about that, you think?"  
  
She shrugged. "I don't know anything about that meeting. Perhaps. My brother always had a bit of a temper. Something about this initiative - and Quatre Winner wasn't its only powerful advocate - rubbed him the wrong way. He felt that he was being watched, and that he was being asked to watch others. The whole thing was too coercive for him."  
  
Duo glanced at me, and the excited glint in his eyes told me that my sweating palms were warranted. "Asmaa, did this community/colony watch organization have a name?" Duo had both feet hooked around the legs of his chair, and he was twitching his heels up and and down.  
  
She watched him nearly vibrating in his seat with amused dark eyes. "I'm not actually sure. The project never got off the ground, not after Quatre Winner died. My brother's death also led to a significant loss of support in this neighborhood, even though the project was supposed to prevent the kind of thing that happened to both of them. It was odd how quickly the wind went of the sails."  
  
"When he was killed, was there any reason for you to suspect something fishy, that your brother was in trouble or that he had any enemies?"  
  
She looked down at the child again, who had fallen asleep with his face pressed against two of the truck wheels. "I know that he was unhappy, that he was troubled by where he thought we were headed. He worried about what could happen to our way of life if we were all watching each other for anything deemed suspicious." She shook her head. "He was proud and good. He wouldn't want me telling you his problems."  
  
"I've been under close surveillance for the last two years," I volunteered, "for my involvement in both wars."  
  
Her gaze lifted to mine as Duo snorted a sharp laugh. "Turns out I have been, too. It'd make anyone go a little nutty."  
  
She nodded. "He tried talking to someone about it, someone that Quatre Winner recommended, actually, but I don't think he liked going to see that man."  
  
"Quatre recommended a therapist to your brother?" It was out of my mouth before I could haul it back.  
  
She nodded, not offended by my incredulous tone. "It was soon after the community watch organization had been proposed, when my brother had voiced his strong objections to it. Quatre Winner made the gesture out of what I'm sure he considered to be good-hearted concern."  
  
"Who was it?" Duo asked, pulling a pad of paper and a pen out of his coat pocket.  
  
"He never told me; that wasn't the sort of thing he'd tell anyone."  
  
He nodded his understanding. "What about the names of the other people who supported that initiative? That'd be real helpful, too."  
  
She exhaled and frowned. "Well, that's a bit easier. All the important figures in this quadrant were on board when - "  
  
The sound of Nadir's raised voice stopped all of us mid-breath and startled the child awake. He sat up and rubbed his cheek, which had tire tracks imprinted upon it. Asmaa bent forward to pick him up and nervously eyed the door. Another man's voice sounded from inside the house.  
  
"We just want to talk to Asmaa; we're not here to cause trouble."  
  
"You're causing trouble barging into my house uninvited, and entering without my permission. I will notify the authorities if you do not leave this instant!"  
  
I sat very still in my chair, even as Duo sprang to his feet. "I know that voice," I said.  
  
Asmaa's sharp eyes flicked to mine. "You children should go now," she said, her voice low and sober.  
  
"Have there been others, Asmaa, other people asking around about your brother?" Duo demanded, taking an aggressive step toward her. I grabbed his wrist to keep him back, struggling to stay ahead of what was happening.  
  
"No, Duo," she said, "but there have been men here looking for you."  
  
He tensed and spun around to face me, jerking his hand out of my grip. "Were we followed? We couldn't have been; we were so careful. We _made sure_."  
  
I closed my eyes and saw Karl standing at the foot of my hospital bed holding a Preventer's badge - dirty, and manic with his new freedom. I saw him dressed in a crisp white shirt, telling me that he missed me and that I had to be careful wherever I went. I saw him tapping a folder against his leg. " _This is where you should pick up, Wufei._ "  
  
"We weren't followed," I murmured. "He knew we would eventually come here."  
  
"What? Who?"  
  
I finally stood up from the tiny desk, straightening my clothes. "Karl knows what we know. He knows everything you've done for me, Duo. He's been through every file on your computer."  
  
"You both should leave now," she said again. "Out the side door."  
  
"How do we get there?" I asked.  
  
"Out to the left, then another left, all the way to the end."  
  
I pushed Duo ahead of me toward the doorway. The voices were getting closer. "Thank you for talking to us," I said in a rush. "Though I don't know why you would help us, if you were already being harassed."  
  
She smiled and stood, hoisting the child higher on her hip. "Because you're just boys. And my brother always supported what you stood for."  
  
I bowed in acknowledgment and farewell and shoved Duo out into the hallway. "Come on," I growled. "Time to run." Judging by the volume of the voices, Nadir had stalled Karl and the men with him in the main room where Asmaa had first greeted us. Duo stumbled ahead of me and I grabbed his arm to keep him upright. "Let's go," I hissed. "We can still stay ahead of them." We both looked over our shoulders as we turned the corner, and I knocked right into Duo when he stopped dead, hand on the wall to keep me from dragging him out of sight.  
  
He was standing in the hall, just a little out of breath. Even from several paces away, I could see that he was in one of his bad spells. He probably hadn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. But his blond hair was cut shorter and neatly parted on the side. His clothes fit his lean frame, though they were a bit wrinkled. His eyes were nearly swallowed in dark circles. He smiled wide enough to show me that his broken teeth had been fixed.  
  
"How long have you been planning this?" I gritted. "How long have you been using me?"  
  
"Don't jump to conclusions, now," he said. "Not when you've already come so far so quickly."  
  
I felt Duo let go of the wall and turn to face Karl full on, though he stayed at my back. "Are you here to turn us in?" he asked. We weren't armed; we'd agreed we couldn't be when entering Asmaa's home and asking her for help. We weren't prepared for a fight.  
  
Karl's lip curled just a little as he lifted his eyes to Duo's. "Depends on whether you're still useful, I guess." He looked at Duo with open contempt, and I was sure that if I turned around, I'd see his expression mirrored in Duo's.  
  
I took a half step forward, wondering whether I'd even once intimidated him in the two years I'd known him. Now wasn't going to be the time to start if I hadn't. "Tell me what you want from all this. Tell me why you betrayed and lied to me."  
  
He looked down at my balled fist, his answer pitched low. "I don't think there's time for me to answer those questions given your circumstances. But would you believe me if I said I just wanted to stay occupied - that I wanted to avoid rotting in that cell?"  
  
"Yes," I hissed.  
  
He exhaled a laugh and looked up to me again, blinking his dark smudged eyes. The blue in them stood out more sharply by contrast. "Well, that'll have to do for now."  
  
Duo was growing tenser by the second at my back, and when Karl spoke again, he only wound himself tighter. I could feel that he was ready to spring.  
  
"But in case I never get the chance to say this, I wanted to thank you for accepting me so quickly, given that toward most everyone in that place you were aggressive and belligerent. You're smart and passionate and uncompromising, but I felt that we were like partners. For a while, I felt like I could have been one of the five. Sorry, I mean four."  
  
I reached behind me to put a restraining hand on Duo's arm. Karl watched me do it, and his grin widened. This was what he excelled at; he'd told me many times. He wasn't much of a fighter, but he could rip a person apart verbally with admirable economy.  
  
"I even look like him, right? I was hoping that just once you would have said his name instead of mine, maybe when we were in the showers toge - "  
  
Duo lunged for Karl even as I spun around to grab his waist. "No, Duo," I said in his ear. "Let's go; let's just go. He can't stop us both."  
  
He shook his head and snarled, "Such a _slimy_ \- "  
  
"It's good to see you've found someone who's still willing to defend your honor, Chang. It wasn't something I could ever be bothered with."  
  
"Because you had none to begin," I snapped over my shoulder, still fighting with Duo to get him around the corner. "You are a disgrace to Kushrenada's memory."  
  
When the two men who'd come with Karl finally made it past Nadir, I saw a momentary slump in Karl's shoulders. I couldn't tell whether he was relieved or disappointed, but in the moment before we finally turned and ran, I raked my eyes over all three of them, finding nothing to mark them as Preventers. Then Duo grabbed my arm and shouted " _Go!"_ So we went.

+

"Hey, up there, quick!" We switched directions, darting between two houses and scrambling up a bunch of pallets to reach the roof. Duo made it before me and turned to haul me up after him. "You okay?" he asked breathlessly as we took off again. "How's your back holding up?"  
  
"It's fine for now," I grunted. The roofs were all flat and wide, and with the houses so close together, it didn't take too much skill or strength to jump from one to the next. But every time I landed, I felt like there was a 50-50 chance that my knee would give out.  
  
Duo glanced back over his shoulder and cursed. "Dammit, those guys are hard to lose. Bergsen's not with'em though." I chanced a quick look and saw them hoisting themselves up onto the roof where we had a minute before. We were pulling ahead because we were younger and quicker, but they weren't giving up. And they had guns, which tended to make the distance between two people shrink very quickly.  
  
"Karl's a smoker and he's out of shape," I said. "And I'm sure he'd consider this below him."  
  
We made it to he next house, and I bit down on a sharp cry, just managing to keep it behind my teeth. I struggled upright and kept going.  
  
"When the fuck did he get out of prison, anyway? And what makes you think he's been through my stuff?"  
  
"After they pulled me out of the coma and before they took me off morphine, he was in my room I think three separate times."  
  
" _What?_ Why didn't you say something?" Duo turned to briefly glare at me.  
  
"Because I thought I was hallucinating," I snapped. "He had a Preventer's badge the first night; I thought he was Quatre the second night; the third time he said he had all the names and information that you'd been collecting since you'd been living with Sam. None of it made any sense."  
  
"Shit, you think he's with Preventers? You think those guys are Preventers?" He looked over his shoulder again and grimaced.  
  
"All I know is that someone who I thought was a hallucination showed me a badge that he was very proud of. Maybe that part was a hallucination and the rest was real. I don't know." I pressed my hand against a painful stitch in my side. Running and talking weren't supposed to go together. "But if he was in Rome the same time you were, if he was out, then I think the information he wanted to show me that night was real. And if the people who were watching you knew you were headed to L4 to get in touch with the Maganacs, and he's with them, then he could guess that we would investigate one of the deaths that happened closest to Quatre's home. He wouldn't have to follow us; he'd know where we'd start - "  
  
"Wu, that guy's actually gonna take a shot!" Duo interrupted.  
  
I turned in time to see one of the men go down on his knee, raising and steadying his gun with two hands.  
  
"We gotta get down from here," Duo shouted breathlessly. "Lose'em a different way."  
  
I nodded and reached for him, pushing his head down even as the gun fired. We tripped and stumbled to the edge of the roof and then dropped to the ground. I tried to roll when I hit, but this time I couldn't keep silent when my back and knee protested the strain I'd put on them. It came out a sharp barking whine, and Duo was at my side in the next second, pulling me to my feet. I could barely put any weight on my knee, and my back was on fire.  
  
"You have to help me," I gritted.  
  
"Okay," he said, securing his arm around my waist. Then we heard another gun shot. They were already on the ground, trying to flank us from the right. Adrenalin came to my rescue once again and the pain faded far enough into the background that I could run.

+

We stopped finally when we were both completely out of breath, turning down a side street in one of the more empty, run down parts of the quadrant. We found a bit of shadow and collapsed back against a plaster wall, bent forward over our knees to keep from passing out. I was numb pretty much from the ribs down, and the fact that I was still able to move was definitely encouraging, but I knew I'd be a mess by tonight. I probably wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. I couldn't remember ever being as tired as I was right then. But we'd lost them about fifteen minutes back and had kept running just to be certain.  
  
I jumped when Duo grabbed my elbow and shoved me upright. I tried to take a step back when I saw the angry glint in his eyes, tried to put a more suitable bit of space between us, but my heels were already backed up against the wall. Duo kept hold of my arm and pushed hard, scraping my shoulder against the rough plaster.  
  
" _What_ was he to you?" he gritted. "I know you were more than neighbors. I know he was fucking... _playing_ with you from the second I saw you together, but were you... were you _with_ him?" His body language was aggressive, his expression a little wild. He was just as high as I was on adrenalin and fear.  
  
"Yes," I spat out between heaving breaths, not feeling that I needed to cushion any of it right then. "We were together." Trying to catch my breath, I coughed up and spit out phlegm. The air was thinner on the colonies and my lungs weren't used to it yet. None of me was used to it yet. "He was a target for a bunch of Romefeller thugs who kicked the shit out of him as part of their Wednesday afternoon free time and so I stepped up and claimed him. I protected him."  
  
At my word's, Duo's face contorted with hurt and jealousy. His throat worked around something that he wanted to shout at me but couldn't quite get out. He was still leaning into me, one hand painfully fisted around my bicep. I slid my shoulder blades down the wall as far as he'd let me, cocking my hips out toward him. I smirked up at him, oddly detached from the words that came out of my mouth. I blamed it on stress and pain overload.  
  
"He was like this every time we screwed. He wanted me closing him in; he liked to feel cornered. He liked it when I hurt him a little, shoved his head against the cinder blocks."  
  
Duo looked at me like he was afraid of me.  
  
And that was one thing that was different between the two of them. Even though I'd always been the one to fuck Karl, even though I technically protected him, I was never in charge. I never felt that I had any power over him, not like I had over Duo right then.  
  
"You fucking asshole," he said between his teeth. "You knew that I - "  
  
"That you what, liked me? Wanted me?" I laughed, still a little out of breath. "I thought maybe you did, but what good would that have done me in that place? The men saw you, they saw how you looked at me and touched me, and that only made it _worse._ You were something to exploit. Karl and I could be partners of a sort, but if you wanted me, then I was a faggot. They saw that fucking bandanna and it was like a goddamn _banner_ that said I was off-limits, even when you weren't there. It was a banner and an _invitation_."  
  
He swallowed hard and looked a little sick. "You never told me. You never said _anything_!"  
  
"How could I? You came to see me all the time, and you were so goddamn _persistent_ and you kept touching me, getting closer every time, I didn't know what to do."  
  
"You could have told me to back off!"  
  
"I didn't _want_ you to back off!"  
  
"Then why did you go to him? Why did you let him touch you and get his claws in you? Why did you let him _change_ you? Why didn't you wait for me?"  
  
And even though we were on a roll by then, my breath caught in my throat momentarily at the destroyed look he was giving me.  
  
"Because I could keep him safe, and he could keep me safe. And he was like me, Duo; he distracted me from everything I wasn't allowed to have. I couldn't just _decide_ that I was with you. And you're fucking more naive than I thought if you think that's the way it worked in there."  
  
Anguished blue eyes finally broke from mine and he hung his head, leaning back from the wall, away from me. But I grabbed him by the belt and jerked him forward again, fitting our hips together and pulling his mouth to mine with a hand on the back of his neck. He grunted a protest and tried to pull back but I growled a warning into his mouth and spun us around, smacking him up against the wall in my place. He looked at me wide-eyed and dazed, but only momentarily, his brow sloping down into a fierce scowl.  
  
"You really want to know what he was to me?" I asked, feeling mean and in control and liking it more than I should have. "I can show you right now." We stood nose to nose, and he held himself very still against the wall as I pushed my hand down the front of his pants. He was hard and he didn't look at all happy about it. With my other hand I undid the button and zipper of his jeans, forcing his underwear lower on his hips with my wrist. "You're bigger than him," I observed. "And uncut. I always thought his looked strange - naked without foreskin." I jerked him off, quick and rough. His breath sped up and he didn't take his eyes off me. "He didn't like me to stretch him much before we had sex either, and I think it was because he was used to other men giving it to him a lot more cruelly than I did." Duo was squirming against the wall, his fingernails scratching through the plaster. "He liked it when - "  
  
"Do you miss him?" Duo said in a rush, slipping out of his anger like he couldn't help it. "Do you wish you could still be with him, even after everything he did? That's all I care about. I don't want to know the rest."  
  
I looked into Duo's eyes and couldn't think of an answer. I closed my own, shutting out Duo's handsome, healthy features, and really tried to _remember_ Karl, every broken smile, every cigarette, the curve of his spine when he arched away from the wall, the ugliness of his betrayal in the sick room, the ugliness of my own anger when I forced him over the table in the library carrel. I opened my eyes to Duo's wary gaze. My hand had slowed. He swallowed and then sniffed.  
  
"I don't want to forget him. That's all."  
  
He nodded.  
  
"What do you want?" I asked, looking at my hand on his cock."Do you want me to stop?"  
  
He shook his head and took a slow breath. Then he smiled a little wickedly. "You're different. Than you were, before. You're mean and a little manipulative." he said, voice rough. "But that's still you, somehow." It was a peace offering even though it didn't sound like one.  
  
I tried to smile and grimaced instead. "We finish now or we don't at all. I can stand for maybe five more minutes."  
  
Duo's laugh was dry and tired. Gently taking my arms, he reversed our positions again, putting my back to the wall. I leaned against it with a heavy grunt, but Duo stole the sound out of my mouth as he pressed close and kissed me, fumbling with the fly of my jeans by feel alone. I tried to help him, but he batted my hands away, finally managing to pull my pants low enough that he could grab both his erection and mine. He broke the kiss long enough to spit into his hand, offering his palm to me with a mumbled apology that his hands were rough. Not really caring by that point, I followed suit and spit into my own palm. He grinned when we resumed jerking each other off, our combined saliva serving as lubricant.  
  
"You like it when I'm manipulative?" I asked into his mouth.  
  
I felt him shrug. "Not really. Only in retrospect, when I've figured out whether you're just fucking with me or whether you're serious."  
  
"I thought I was being serious."  
  
"We probably wouldn't be doing this right now, if you had been. Nngh. Chang, shut up for a bit."  
  
We tried to be quiet, but the sound we made, thrusting into our circled hands, was obscene and erotic and soon Duo was gasping curses into my ear, telling me exactly how close he was to orgasm. "Sshh," I hissed distractedly, trying to focus on the itch in my lower abdomen that meant I was close, too. I didn't have any more adrenalin and I was about to run out of lust and when that happened, Duo was probably going to have to carry me to a bed, but I refused to worry about that as Duo finally wrung the last of my energy out of me. I came with an exhausted groan just before he did, slumping further down the wall until he took a shuddering breath and helped me straighten, speaking low and quick in my ear.  
  
"God, I swear I won't let anyone take you away again. I'd go anywhere you wanted, just - "  
  
"Just get me home," I said fuzzily, anticipating the time when the pleasant buzzing in my fingers would change to searing pain in my back and leg.  
  
My eyes already closed, I felt Duo hesitate before setting about cleaning us up the best he could. Then he turned around and went down on his knees. "Climb on, buddy," he said.  
  
I fell forward onto his back and then he carefully stood up, hooking his hands under my knees and hoisting me higher up above his hips. I wrapped my arms around his neck and lay my head on his shoulder. "Are we going home?"  
  
He hesitated as we stepped out into the bright artificial light of the colony day cycle. "I don't really know where you mean, Wu."


	20. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

Long winding Canadian highways,  
innumerable evergreens.  
Weather forecast on the AM radio  
says we'll be expecting highs in the low teens.  
When I mouth my silent curses at you,  
I can see my breath.  
I hope the stars don't even come out tonight.  
I hope we both freeze to death.  
- _"Family Happiness" Mountain Goats  
_  
The muscle cramps started that night, and while I lay awake, struggling to breath through them, I passed the time trying to reproduce the pamphlet's and my doctor's exact warning after the muscle regeneration had been completed.  
  
"Muscle regeneration has proven very successful, returning full motor function to those who have lost it due to traumatic injury. However the proper amount of recovery time must be observed. The regenerated muscle is new, fragile, and foreign in your body. Therefore, a careful muscle rehabilitation schedule should be kept. Overworking the new muscle can cause significant soreness and muscle spasms. Severe strain can cause the new muscle to detach from the tendons, and in the worst case can cause internal hemorrhaging. So it is of the utmost importance that you treat this new tissue very carefully."  
  
Heero would have been a good bit more brief about the whole thing. "You should have known better, Chang. It's only a miracle fix if you follow the rules."  
  
There wasn't any hemorrhaging. Duo and a mirror had satisfied that concern. But the muscle spasms were frequent and paralyzing, stealing my breath and my voice. When it became apparent that this was not a quickly passing problem, that the cramps were likely to continue through the night, I carefully pushed myself into a sitting position and leaned over the side of the bed to collect my loose-fitting sweats. I pulled on my clothes and then shifted on the bed to lean against the wall, situating the pillow at my lower back. In between the spasms, I felt weak and shaky and knew that, without significant effort on my part, the spasms were likely to recur more and more often as I tired further.  
  
Lightly resting my hands on my knees, I slowed and deepened my breaths, systematically relaxing downwards, starting with my eyes and facial muscles.  
  
Duo slept beside me, oblivious. We'd relocated to a different hotel, though, as I'd suspected, we met no trouble at the old one. In all likelihood, Karl didn't know where we were staying. Still, our new room felt safer.  
  
It took a few minutes for Duo to realize that his sleeping arrangement had changed, but when he did notice, he sucked in a quick breath and sat up. The second I blinked my eyes open to look at him, my concentration broke, and a sharp cramp in my hamstring forced me into motion.  
  
"Wu? You okay?" His voice was thick with sleep, but he got to his knees when he recognized the nature of the pain in my leg. Not waiting for an answer, he leaned forward to help me straighten out my knee, putting firm pressure on my thigh while I took slow breaths through my nose and put pressure directly on the cramping muscle. The pain warped my sense of time, and I didn't know how long we stayed like that, wrestling for control over a muscle that felt like it had a mind of its own. Eventually, I felt him sync his breathing to mine, and the shared rhythm restored a light meditative trance so that the cramp eventually eased. I heard him retreat back onto his heels and scratch a hand through his hair. Refocusing my attention on releasing the tension in my shoulders and chest, I was grateful when he left me alone. I heard him slide off the bed to go to the bathroom and exhaled downward, picturing my lungs gently pushing out and down against tense muscle.  
  
More time passed without incident and when I next opened my eyes, Duo was again seated next to me on the bed.  
  
Into the silence of the room, he murmured, "Can I get you anything? You want water, or something?"  
  
I sat forward a bit, carefully rolling my shoulders. "An epidural would be nice."  
  
"I don't have one of those. I've got morphine, though."  
  
I raised an eyebrow at that. "Why the hell do you have morphine? You hate that stuff."  
  
"I didn't know what kinda shape I'd find you in when I busted you out. I wanted to be ready to dope you up if I had to."  
  
"I'm really glad you didn't. What else have you got stashed in that duffel - bodies?"  
  
He grinned lopsidedly. "I don't have to incriminate myself to you, Chang, even if we are sleeping in the same bed. Do you want the morphine?"  
  
I sat back against the wall again and reassessed my situation. The meditation had done significant work to relax the cramping muscles, but I still felt ragged and weak - like the smallest muscle twitch or tremor could turn into a spasm with only the slightest provocation. "I'm all right for the moment, though I probably won't be sleeping much tonight."  
  
Duo slid over to sit next to me. "That's okay; I'll stay up with you. No fair if I get my beauty sleep and you're the only grump in the morning."  
  
I nodded my thanks, and we were still for awhile. I thought maybe he'd already dropped off again when I felt him giving me an uncomfortable look.  
  
"You think you did anything permanent, running like that for so long?"  
  
I carefully shrugged. "Not sure, though I think I'd be able to tell if there was something really wrong. I probably just set myself back a week or two. Time should be enough to get over this."  
  
He groaned. "Yeah, and we have none of that."  
  
I couldn't disagree with him on that point so stayed quiet.  
  
Beside me, Duo worried a hangnail on his thumb and blew out a breath that ruffled his bangs. "You think Asmaa was bein' straight with us today?"  
  
I focused on keeping my neck and back relaxed and continued to face forward when I spoke. "I think she was. Do you?"  
  
He nodded, and I could hear his smile. "Yeah, she's a fighter like her brother was. She knew the difference between the two of us and the thugs who showed up with Bergsen."  
  
"Sure, but she was expecting us."  
  
"But it was obvious she didn't like those guys; they weren't welcome in her house. She knew what sort of people they were."  
  
"Right. But do _we_ know what sort of people they were? If Karl is actually a Preventer what does that mean?"  
  
I turned the slightest bit to see Duo glaring at the ceiling for a moment. Then his expression settled on unease. "One of two things, I guess. Either Preventers itself is a corrupt agency and there's no hope for us, or just the part that hired Karl is. Or, a third possibility, maybe this is how the law works these days and it's you and I who are out of sync with it - which wouldn't be too surprising."  
  
"Or Preventers is trying to find out who's behind all this by using us to draw the fire. Karl said as much when I saw him in my hospital room. And he did let us escape Asmaa's house."  
  
Duo scowled. "He didn't let us escape; he just didn't chase us himself."  
  
"But he did say we were still useful. You especially have been useful, Duo, more so than I. You - " As I turned a bit more to face him, my back cramped and I quickly faced forward again, holding a hand over the contracting muscle. I tried to let go of the tension, to let my body regain control over all its parts by relaxing as much as I could, but all I could think was how stupid I had been to ignore that only a few weeks ago I had nearly died from a knife in the kidney. My carelessness with my health was costing us too much time now.  
  
This spasm was worse than the others because I was so tired. It held me rigid on the bed until I finally opened my eyes long enough to nod to Duo. His jaw clenched and then he slid off the bed to fetch his duffel, returning a moment later with a small bottle and a syringe.  
  
"You have done this before, right?" I said, voice as even as I could make it.  
  
He pushed my sleeve up my arm and felt around for a good vein. "Course I have, though only on myself when I was already out of my mind with pain and injury." He huffed a laugh as he stuck the syringe into the bottle and drew back the plunger. "If I could do it then, I can do it anywhere, right?"  
  
I nodded my assent. "Hurry up."  
  
"Okay, okay," he grumbled, pulling my arm into his lap and smoothly inserting the needle. I looked away as he did it because I'd never done well with needles and I liked even less the feeling of the fluid going into my arm. But, as he'd said, Duo was no novice when it came to pain and injury. He slipped the needle from my arm and handed me a bit of gauze to hold over the spot, before taking the syringe and bottle to the bathroom. The relief was almost instantaneous, nerves dulling and knotted tissue relaxing. I lifted the gauze to see that the needle site was clean with only the faintest red mark as evidence. Duo came back to the room empty-handed, wiping wet hands on his t-shirt.  
  
"That is a narcotic, you know, and I'm pretty sure the housecleaning staff is required to report it, even if - ."  
  
"The 'Do Not Disturb' sign is already on the door, Wu. And I'll clean it up by morning, I promise," he grunted. "Try to sleep, okay? You're more useful on your feet than on your back." He bypassed the bed and went straight for his laptop where it was charging on the dresser. He stood staring down at it, stretching one arm over his head and grabbing his elbow to stretch out his shoulder. "You really think he's been through everything?"  
  
"Karl?" Duo nodded. "Yeah, I do. He's as good as you in that department. Maybe as good as Heero. A mobile suit designer working directly under Treize - he had access to every kind of training he cared to take advantage of. And I've never known anyone as curious or as self-serving as Karl. He would have taken advantage."  
  
He let go of his elbow and twisted around to look at me, pulling a sour face. "You probably don't want me to kill him, do you?"  
  
I returned his sour expression. "I hope you'll never see him to have that opportunity. I hope we can figure whether there's a connection between Said and this bizarre community watch initiative that no one I know has ever heard of, a connection that goes all the way to Earth. Then we can tell Une about it, and she can sort out this mess with Karl so we don't have to go anywhere near it."  
  
Duo picked up his laptop, unplugged it, and then brought it over to the bed, opening it and sitting cross-legged beside me. "Hopefully, it was a one-time hack," he muttered. "He better not have put any shit on here to leave my ass hangin' for just anyone to see, or I really will go after the little creep."  
  
I snorted a laugh at that image. "You're good enough to find it if he did," I said, still half-smiling when Duo turned to give me a strange look.  
  
"Damn right I am," he said. He booted up the computer, fingers flying over the keyboard, so that I couldn't pick out more than a few letters and numbers of the long password. "That's something else that's different about you, buddy," he said to the screen. "You're meaner, yeah, which isn't surprising, but you laugh now, too. And you didn't before. Did you really grow a sense of humor in that place?" His eyes met mine briefly before returning to his laptop, where he was running some scan, doubtless to check his computer for hacks or holes.  
  
I didn't answer because I didn't have anything more to say than, "I don't know, maybe?"  
  
"I mean, were there actually people funnier than me there?"  
  
I laughed again and Duo turned to watch, eyes traveling over my face, like he didn't mind this change. "There were plenty of funny people at RCNP. And there was more time to find them funny. When you came to visit, there was more time to find you funny. It wasn't one of those 'either laugh about the situation or get pissed' things - it was..." I still didn't have a real answer.  
  
"It was that you didn't feel like the world was going to end if you took thirty seconds out of your day to laugh. You'd already prevented the world from ending."  
  
"Maybe that was it." I realized the morphine was starting to take effect when muscle weakness turned to dull numbness. My body was heavy on the bed and I finally felt nothing.  
  
"There were lots of pissed off scary dudes there, but they laughed, too. You know, I think I probably only ever saw Heero laugh when he was visiting you. How's that for shitty?"  
  
I closed my eyes and could put myself right back in the common room, seated around Benji's table with Karl and a few others, playing cards right until the end of our free time. Everyone laughed at his table. When Benji could persuade Onur to sit down with us, mostly we laughed at him. He never took offense because he never cared what we thought of him; he was busy making his own future. We thought that we probably weren't going to get much of one, even with this supposed opportunity at our fingertips. Maybe that was where the time and space to laugh had opened up.  
  
I wondered at what moment Karl had seized his opportunity, when he had chosen his path, if he'd done it before or after we met, before or after Duo had started his own work on the case. "He's after you now, too," I said blearily, startling myself with the sound of my own voice. Duo jumped as well, looking away from his computer to regard me with a raised eyebrow. "You've proven yourself more useful than I with everything you've done for our case. With Said and all those other men. Whether he was using me or really wanted me dead, he now surely wants the same for you."  
  
Duo nodded, but didn't reply, turning back to his laptop. I saw that he had opened Dilawar Said's file and was now typing up what we'd learned today. I finally fell asleep to the sound of the keys. I dreamed of lists of names.

+

I woke up in a cool, dark room, knowing that I was alone. The bed was unfamiliar, the tiled ceiling could have belonged anywhere, and the walls were nondescript. The quiet hum of the vent by the window could only have belonged in a hotel. And I knew exactly what Duo meant when he'd said that if I wanted to go home, he didn't know where to take me.  
  
I rolled onto my side and switched on the lamp by the bed, then carefully sat up and swung my legs to the floor. I tried walking and found that I could, though my back and knee were painfully stiff. I hobbled across the room to the window and drew back the heavy curtain, letting in the bright light of what looked to be midday. I ran a hand over my cropped hair. None of it was long enough to get tangled, but it felt dirty. I didn't need to sniff under my arms to know that I smelled even worse than I looked.  
  
I made a slow circuit of the room, brushing my fingers against furniture and walls as I passed. I stopped by the bathroom door, noting the pair of crutches as well as the folded wheel chair, both leaning against the wall. My stomach lurched at the sight of them, but I kept going, shuffling into the bathroom and closing the door to a crack behind me. I put toothpaste on my toothbrush and while I scrubbed the night and previous day's scum off of them, I turned on the shower. I was too grimy to take a bath, as appealing as submerging myself in hot water sounded.  
  
Duo had left the seat of the toilet up, so I put both it and the lid down before I sat down, elbows on my knees, to finish brushing. My stomach was about to start rumbling; hopefully Duo was just out getting food. Hopefully he hadn't decided to do something stupid like go back to Asmaa Said's to finish our interrupted conversation.  
  
I stood and spat out my toothpaste, gritting my teeth against the twinge in my back as I bent over the sink to rinse my mouth. Then I stripped and stepped into the shower. I leaned against the wall for most of it, not trusting myself to be able to stay upright for the whole thing. Dried sweat and street dirt came off with a bit of scrubbing and then I just stood there, wondering if this hotel had a kitchen or if I would have to venture out for food. I wondered if Duo would be back by the time I turned off the water.  
  
I wasted about twenty minutes thinking that way.

+

I opted for the crutches instead of the wheelchair. If I found Duo, I could smack him over the head with one of the crutches, whereas I wouldn't be quick enough to run him down in the wheelchair. The wheelchair would take practice. With these admittedly childish impulses driving my actions, I swallowed a few aspirin, pulled on a jacket and went out in search of food.  
  
The hotel was in one of the busier parts of town, so it wasn't difficult to disappear in the lunch crowd. The street one block over was closed to everything but foot traffic at midday, the sidewalks lined with food and craft stalls. It occurred to me as I made my way past them that this was to be my first purchase in over two years. I was about to buy my own lunch and then eat it whenever I chose. I could get any number of dishes, many of the stalls selling the foods one would expect in this area - falafel, hummus, grilled zucchini, different kabobs - but there were also Pakistani places, even Thai. The prospect of real spices and fresh ingredients made my pulse quicken until I remembered that this was L4, so fresh foodstuffs had a long way to travel to get here. But that didn't really matter since I had all afternoon to look for exactly what I wanted. I didn't have to fight with pushy inmates or harried guards telling me to get a move on or get out of line. For the first time in two years, I was a consumer.  
  
I ended up with a veritable mountain of food, most of it meat, all of it, except for some flatbread, very spicy. Feeling absurdly proud of myself and my purchases, I sat at one of the public tables to eat it, watching the residents and workers stream by. Most were dressed in variations of the traditional garb of the culture, but many of the men, and a few of the women, wore suits. I looked down at my jeans, plain-colored t-shirt and hooded gray jacket and wondered if I should invest in some clothes of my own. I didn't particularly care for these anyway. I took a large swallow of iced tea to wash down a bite of spicy lentils and potatoes and decided that, no, I didn't think I was ready for more shopping.  
  
When I'd eaten my fill, I packed up the rest of the food and put it back in the bag, looping it around my wrist and heading back for the hotel. If Duo had returned, I'd force-feed him a few of the hot chilis. If he hadn't, I'd stick the food in the mini fridge and eat the rest for dinner.  
  
He'd taken his laptop with him, wherever he'd gone, so when I returned to the room, I picked up the printout of Said's file, returning to the bed with it and carefully spreading out on the bedspread. I looked over all the information Duo had gathered on him, adding in pen "Colony Watch" and "Karl Bergsen."  
  
Duo and I still didn't know who exactly was pursuing us. We were both leaning toward Preventers. International and inter-planetary fugitives were usually theirs to find. Standard operating procedure for Preventers, working with RCNP, would have been to send a team after us and alert the appropriate satellite offices where we might be headed. Duo had definitely been followed in his preparations for springing me from the hospital. And Karl had definitely carried a badge when I saw him. Additionally, Preventers were already wrapped up in my affairs. Une knew what was happening with me at RCNP often before I did. If I added this new civilian organization that was supposed to span entire colony clusters, and slid Karl's name as well as those who'd tailed Duo into that column, then a new potential culprit emerged. Except that supposedly the organization hadn't gotten off the ground after Quatre and Said's deaths. I rolled onto my back. Maybe its work had already been done by that time, or maybe the organization had since evolved into something else.

+

I heard footsteps outside our door and then a key in the lock and figured that Duo was either warning me that he was coming in - because he never made that much noise - or someone else had decided it was acceptable to enter our room without knocking. I scrambled up from where I'd been lying on the floor - wishing fervently for Heero's assistance while stretching out my back - and hoisted myself the rest of the way up using the crutches. Duo's gun was on the bed, directly behind my right thigh and, as the door opened, I leaned down to grab it, holding it loose and ready. Duo entered as though it were the middle of the night, after he'd made all that noise outside, stepping with cat's feet and quietly closing the door behind him. I knew that he'd seen me standing there, armed, at the end of the bed, but he didn't meet my eyes.  
  
Then, when the door was shut, he turned around with a big grin on his face, like he expected me to be happy to see him.  
  
I dropped the gun back on the bed, limped forward on my crutches, and then, leaning heavily on the left one, shoved the rubber foot end of the right firmly against his breastbone. His grin turned sheepish and then faded when he bumped back against the door. I held him pinned there and glared at him.  
  
"We don't need to fight about this, Duo, because I'm sure you already know that what you did was very stupid. You already know that it's not something you do to a partner or a friend. It's not something you do when there's a crazy, smart man who may be a Preventer after you, not when he's got friends with guns. It's not something you do."  
  
I pushed a little harder and he winced, shrinking in a bit around the end of the crutch. I realized I was probably pressing right where he'd been hit through the flak jacket and dropped the crutch, turning away to lean them against the wall and lower myself to the bed.  
  
He stepped away from the door, rubbing his chest through his shirt, that grin already returning. "I'm sorry, Wu. I know I shouldn't have, but I - "  
  
"You're sorry? Duo, you're _smiling_ ; how sorry can you be?"  
  
He shook his head. "I know, I know, but we're not fighting, right? You just said we didn't need to."  
  
"I'm not actually sure I meant that."  
  
"Wu, I went back to Asmaa."  
  
I groaned, and he came over to the bed, kneeling down in front of me.  
  
"I went back and she gave me names. She gave me all the names of the guys who were on board for this colony watch thing. That lady's got a mind like a steel trap. She knew names, she knew families, she knew family problems. She even knew the other dead L4 vets I mentioned to her just on the off chance she'd heard anything."  
  
He reached up to excitedly shake my knee and I froze, staring down at his knuckles. The skin was broken and bloody. I grabbed his hand before he could jerk it back, and he flinched.  
  
"Hey - "  
  
I held him by the wrist, scanning the underside of this arm, finding a torn sleeve and a bloody elbow, along with some gravel stuck in the heel of his palm opposite his thumb, just above my fingers. "Was Karl there? Were you caught in that house _again_? Asmaa should notify the -"  
  
Duo pulled his hand out of my grip and stood up, shrugging out his sweatshirt. "It wasn't at their house; it was on the way back here. And it wasn't Karl."  
  
I checked him over for other injuries when he stretched his arms over his head to pull off the soiled garment, but I didn't see any. "Who was it then?"  
  
He gave a restless shrug, twisting his arm around to tentatively prod the road rash on his elbow. He hissed at it. "Hell if I know. Probably part of the same posse, though. Just said, 'We only wanna talk to you, Mr. Maxwell.'"  
  
"I take it you didn't talk?"  
  
He shook his head. "I ran. They split up. The one guy who got the closest turned out to be more of a runner than a fighter. He caught up to me, but I swear I only tapped him a couple times and he went down like a total lightweight." He sucked on his palm, wincing as some of the gravel came loose. He leaned over and spit it into the basket by the bed.  
  
"Did you find anything on him?" My voice was starting to sound desperate even to me.  
  
He shook his head. "A wallet confirming he's definitely from outta town - the UK specifically - but nothing beyond a civilian ID. They were waiting for me not far from Asmaa's house. Her husband was home this time, and he said he'd notified the local police that Karl and a few others had been harassing them. And there were actually officers staked out watching the place."  
  
"That's encouraging, I think."  
  
"Yeah, I talked to' em - much to their annoyance - and they said they hadn't seen anything suspicious. But the guys who jumped me did it about two blocks from the house. If they were Preventers, then they're in deep enough cover that they couldn't let local cops know they were looking for us, not looking to hassle Asmaa Said." He went into the bathroom then and left the door open, turning on the faucet. "So basically, I know a lot more than I did when I left here this morning," he called over the sound of the water, "but nothing conclusive. Just more stuff to check out."  
  
I nodded, bending forward and reaching with my crutch to catch the loop of his smaller knapsack, inside which I found his laptop. "Did your computer weather the chase?"  
  
He chuckled. "Yeah, that thing's been through much worse. Honestly, whoever's after us right now isn't trying too hard to catch us. That's twice we've gotten away on foot." He emerged from the bathroom with a wad of wet toilet paper over his elbow. "And if they were waiting for me, why didn't they stop me before I made it to Asmaa's? It's almost like they're giving us time to figure' em out."  
  
I pulled the computer into my lap. "Maybe they are."  
  
"Well, open it up and we can get started checking out who these guys are."

+

We opted for the wheelchair instead of the crutches, though I didn't let Duo anywhere near the back of the chair to push me. The trolleys that transported local traffic through the neighborhoods were all handicap accessible, so each time we boarded, I had to wait for the ramp to flip down before I could follow Duo on. It was a little annoying and attracted a lot of attention, but there was no way I could have walked or stood for as long or as far as we went that day, and I refused to be left behind.  
  
The first two men Asmaa had named - Khaled Habib and Abdul Rahimi - had proven to be most unhelpful in what they said, but hinted at a lot in what they didn't. Habib was a pediatrician who told us that he didn't have time for a lunch break let alone a few minutes to talk with us. And no, he didn't want us contacting him at his home. When we asked him about the colony watch initiative, he only shook his head. "No one's spoken about that in years. Everyone in this community is far too wrapped up in their own lives to take responsibility for each other."  
  
Rahimi owned a small chain of restaurants and turned us away cold, even though he was only sitting drinking tea when we entered his business.  
  
"Please, Mr. Rahimi, we just want to know more about this program you supported along with these other men. You know them, right? Ehsan Aman, Khaled Habib, Ahmad Farookh, Khalil -" Duo held his pad of paper out as though it would mean something to him. I was embarrassed at how out of place we were, how much we obviously stuck out amongst people who had no obligation whatsoever to be open with us. Duo had no inside contacts, he had no favors to call in. The only person who could have helped us - Auda, our escort - was more or less off-limits if we didn't want to drag the Maganacs further into our problems.  
  
"Either buy something or leave, boys, but I don't tolerate loiterers."  
  
"We'd be happy to buy a meal from you, sir," I said, rolling my chair to Duo's side. "If you would talk to us for a bit. We'd like to know why the initiative you supported didn't become law, why the community didn't support it with you. If you could - "  
  
He stood from his table and pointed to the door. "I am very busy and it is rude of you to come into my place of work demanding my time and causing trouble. Please do not come back. Your business is not welcome here."  
  
We didn't want to cause more of a scene than we already had, so we left, feeling like the entire neighborhood was staring at the backs of our necks. And given what had happened already, they probably were.  
  
We spent the rest of the afternoon on a train to the very edge of the quadrant to meet with Ahmad Farookh, whom we had called ahead. He was an investor and a property owner - pretty much everything the Winners didn't have a hand in, Farookh owned, especially at the outer rim of the quadrant where he lived. Like all of the other men Asmaa had mentioned to Duo, he had avoided direct involvement in the war. And like about half of them, he had contributed monetarily to the Alliance military, siding with the many colonists who hadn't wanted to anger the Earth Sphere by making a bid for independence.  
  
His home did not have wheelchair access, unlike most of the others which had doors at street level, so I left the chair by the side of the house and walked with Duo, trying not to limp too obviously.  
  
Farookh wanted to show us that he had money and power. He did the former by leading us on a circuitous root to a small but lavishly decorated parlor, showing off the entire first floor of his house and in the process, wearing down my already thin temper. He did the latter by answering our questions with the kind of attitude that indicated it didn't matter if we knew the truth or not. Something like truth and falsehood amounted to the same thing to a person who could buy whatever they wanted.  
  
"Quatre Winner was a man to be feared in this part of space - generally, what he wanted, he got. And he very much wanted that initiative to go through."  
  
"Why?" Duo asked.  
  
"He tried to hide it, but his health was failing." I stiffened at that and Farookh saw it. He smiled and looked a bit like a large predator as he did it. "After the wars, the consensus was peace, but the colony was still divided as to who was sovereign. Were we to remain colonists or should the Earth Sphere recognize our independence? Winner wanted to foster a sense of public responsibility. He wanted everyone to feel invested in each other, to empathize, if you will. He thought if all the colonies could foster such an attitude, we would all be able to determine what was best for ourselves. It was an ambitious project, one that he wanted to leave as his legacy, something that would last amongst the people he cared so deeply for."  
  
"I'm getting the sense that's not what you envisioned," Duo said dryly.  
  
Farookh smiled again. "You sense correctly. I wanted security and thought this was a good way to go about getting it. Turns out very few were as idealistic as Winner, but neither were they so paranoid as I. They turned out to be apathetic."  
  
"That's what Dr. Khaled Habib told us this afternoon."  
  
A scowl flickered across his features and was gone. "Yes, I would put him in the idealistic camp with Winner."  
  
"Mr. Farookh, did you know Dilawar Said?" I asked.  
  
His eyes slid to mine. "No," he said after a pause. "I did not have that pleasure."  
  
"What about Bahram Farhad? He lived nearby and was killed almost on your doorstep."  
  
Farookh's eyes narrowed. "I know where he lived, thank you. But I was not acquainted with him either, though from what I understand he was a terrible neighbor and a bit of a zealot. What does this have to do with your earlier questions?"  
  
"Potentially nothing," Duo cut in. "But those two men, along with Quatre Winner all died right around the same time, when this community initiative was being hotly debated. We've been looking into their deaths, looking for possible causes other than those listed in the police files, so any help you could - "  
  
"I have nothing to say about either Bahram or Dilawar, other than it is unfortunate what happened to them. And now, I've told you everything relevant to your questions, so I'd appreciate it if you left me the rest of my evening."

+

The train ride back to our hotel was quiet. Duo was sullen and pensive. I was cranky, sore and tired of feeling like a cripple again. Asking Farookh about the two men who had been killed around the time of Quatre's death and in the thick of debates surrounding the community watch initiative had been risky, but also necessary if we were going to get anywhere with our case. Unfortunately, the bodies were all too long in the ground and the usual channels of authority were not available to us. Riding home, I thought that the magnitude of discovering a tangible link between this strange initiative which had supposedly gone nowhere, the dead bodies Duo had collected, and Quatre's suicide was dragging both of us down. And that didn't even touch what had happened at RCNP, what had happened to me.  
  
That night, Duo revealed that he was thinking along similar lines. The room was dark, the heavy curtain pulled across the window, and the sound of the fan was just starting to lull me to sleep when I felt Duo slide closer under the blankets. I felt his breath on my neck, between my shoulder and ear, and shivered.  
  
"If we really have found the link between Said and Quatre, and maybe this other vet, Bahram Farhad, and maybe any number of other guys who didn't go along with this paranoid turn in colonial politics, then these guys who so strongly supported it are the key. A network of people with closets full of meetings and deals and connections. And maybe one of those connections goes all the way to Earth. Maybe the colonies are where this started, with a bunch of concerned citizens and political heavyweights, but the real work is figuring out everyone in the network, figuring out where the power goes, beyond just this quadrant."  
  
I stayed staring up at the ceiling. "Wherever the power goes, we find the bodies."  
  
"Lucky for us, we've already got bodies. Now we just need to trace the power backwards from you."  
  
"Makes me feel small."  
  
"Makes me feel like we've got too much to figure out."  
  
I turned to face him. "Should we ask for help?"  
  
He hesitated. "You mean from the guys?"  
  
I nodded. "Heero would believe us; he'd help us."  
  
"I don't want to mess with him and Preventers. He and Tro are so new in their positions. We could really screw things up for them if we dragged' em into this."  
  
"Sometimes I forget what you did to get us here. I forget that it's something we're not allowed to do anymore."  
  
"I wish I could."  
  
His voice was close and intimate in the cool darkness of the room. I reached for him and ran my hand across his ribs, sliding my fingers between the ridges of bone. He made a small sound in his throat, part laugh, part something much more needy. I pulled him closer and then slid over him, holding myself carefully on my forearms.  
  
"One thing I learned in prison is that it's still possible to do this."  
  
He leaned up to kiss me, and I could tell that he was smiling. "Thanks for the tip."

+

The next few days bore a striking resemblance to the previous. We traveled extensively through the quadrant, seeking out and attempting to talk to all the men Asmaa had said were big-time supporters of the community watch initiative - CWI for short, since were tired of talking about a program that didn't have a name. Reactions generally fell into one of two categories - real disappointment that nothing had come out of the campaign, or stiff refusal to talk about it. And no one wanted to talk about the bodies.  
  
We didn't see Karl or any of the men who'd jumped Duo, but we always felt watched. We walked - or in my case, hobbled - down the street in the middle of the day cycle and we spoke openly with several of the most powerful individuals on the colony. We were seen by anyone who cared to look. And still, no one interfered.

+

After a week of precious little advancement in the case, Duo got antsy.  
  
"So let's say that these guys we've tried talking to really did get in over their heads, supporting an initiative that would encourage people to watch each other and turn each other in for suspicious activities. And let's say these guys realized the potential danger of the thing when dissenters started ending up dead. CWI gets the ax and as far as anyone knows, that's that. No more potentially dangerous program, but also no more political enemies. For a lot of these guys, CWI did exactly what it was supposed to do in the short amount of time it lived. Both Dilawar Said and Quatre would have made formidable enemies - this Braham guy, too, by the looks of it."  
  
"But even if all that's true," I said, "it doesn't get us to Earth, to what happened to Benji or Wasyliw, or to you and me. Where did the decision to drug all the inmates the night Benji was killed originate? Who decided that you should be followed? We would need to trace the mentality behind CWI - if not the program itself - to Earth in order for any of this to be related."  
  
Duo heaved a frustrated sigh. "Quatre would have known. If he was in at the ground level, then he would know everyone involved, including anyone who'd taken the idea to Earth to try it out on the population of RCNP."  
  
I nodded. "But like pretty much everyone else who would be useful, he's two years in the ground."  
  
Duo's mouth hardened into a grim, stubborn line. I sat up from where I'd been resting on the bed, recognizing that look. It was the one I'd failed to spot just before Duo had disappeared for two weeks to arrange for our flight from Earth.  
  
"But his sisters aren't," he said, voice low. "A few of them were just as active in colony politics as Quatre. They might know what he knew."  
  
I shook my head. "They would also already have been contacted by every single governmental and non-governmental agency currently on our tail. When Karl learned we were headed for L4, the Winners would have been the first place he'd check for us."  
  
"Sure," Duo admitted, forcing some cheer back into his voice. "And they'd find that we weren't there, and hadn't been there since we arrived. The Winners might not be under such close watch by now."  
  
"Duo," I said, voice as stern as I could make it. "We agreed that any attempt to get into Quatre's home or his business would be too dangerous - "  
  
"Yeah, but we're running out of options. If the CWI guys won't talk to us - which they haven't really so far - then - "  
  
"Then we go to the families of the men you've already singled out. Asmaa Said was our biggest break because she _wanted_ to talk about her brother. The families of the dead _always_ want to talk. Braham Farhad is a good place to go next. Maybe there's a connection between him and Farookh."  
  
Duo didn't answer, glaring down at his laptop. The stubborn line of his jaw hadn't changed.  
  
"We can't go there on our own, Duo," I said. "You especially can't Don't be blindly stubborn about this. Going to see the Winners, we'd be walking into a trap. If I was supposed to die at RCNP, then you are surely in as much danger now, too. "  
  
He met my eyes long enough to nod, then stood and went over to his duffel, moodily throwing clothes into it. "We better be ready to move in the morning,then," he snapped, "because this part of town has outlived its usefulness."  
  
I sank back on the bed and didn't answer him, knowing that nothing I said would help.  
  
We fell asleep that night without speaking.

+

 _"What's the first thing you'll do when you're out?"_  
  
_Wufei rolls to the side to look down to the lower bunk, finding Duo on his back, arms behind his head, an ankle propped up on his knee. The slate gray coveralls make his skin look washed-out and sallow. Duo smiles up at him and asks again. "What will you do?"_  
  
_Wufei rolls onto his back. "I'll drink lots of fluids and go to use the bathroom as many times as I want, without asking." Below him, Duo laughs. "I'll park my car across two spaces. I'll write cranky letters to the editor every week. I'll eat fresh produce and fish every day. I'll grow out my hair and never wear mourning white again. What about you?"_  
  
_"I'm thinking food, too. Mostly I just want to buy something and eat it out in the street, with cars speeding past and people shouting at each other because they're crabby and late for work. A hot dog maybe, with lots of mustard and relish."_  
  
_Wufei swallows. "I can almost taste it, and I don't even like hot dogs."_  
  
_"Hey, will you miss me?"_  
  
_Wufei sits up when he hears the barred door slide shut, his answer stuck in his throat when he sees Duo already on the other side, hands cuffed behind him, being led away by two guards. Duo doesn't look back and Wufei is so lonely he can barely move. He huddles on his bunk and tries to stay warm._

+

I woke up freezing cold, cursing and thrashing in the bed, finally throwing off the blankets to confirm that the knot of dread in my gut wasn't unfounded. Duo was gone again, along with his computer and his duffel. The room was void of his presence. He'd even taken his toothbrush. I kept moving before I could start thinking, throwing on my clothes and barely remembering to grab the room key before sprinting down to the front desk. I was shouting at the clerk before I even opened the door leading out of the stairwell.  
  
"How long ago did he leave? You saw him go, right? When was it; _when_ did he leave?" I reached the desk to see a young man, barely older than me, sitting there with a greasy breakfast sandwich halfway to his mouth. His eyes were wide and red. He'd probably been drunk the night before. "Dammit, _answer the question_!"  
  
"I - I - "  
  
I reached right over the desk and grabbed the sandwich, smacking it down on its paper wrapper and getting ketchup on my hand in the process. I grabbed the kid's collar, smearing ketchup on his neck and chin when I hauled him forward. "Tell me. When. Duo. Left." I cursed inwardly, remembering that wasn't the name he'd rented the room under. And for the life of me, I couldn't think of the name he'd used.  
  
"I don't - I just - "  
  
"Skinny, young, long braid, loud? Ring any bells?"  
  
"IjustcameontwentyminutesagoandIdidn'tseeanyoneohGodI'msorry!"  
  
I replayed that a few times before it made sense, then shoved him back into his chair, wiping the rest of the ketchup on his shirt. I decided I had everything I needed already in my pockets; the crutches and wheelchair would only have slowed me down. My back and leg had improved a lot over the week because I'd been resting so much, and I hoped that they would hold out for the length of time it took me to get to the Winner mansion.  
  
He'd left no word of where he was headed, but the stubborn set of his jaw and the restless glint in his eyes from the previous night told me everything I needed to know. As I pushed through the lobby door and emerged onto the sidewalk, I tried to rationalize why he would leave me behind again, after I had made it clear that such behavior was both dangerous and insulting.  
  
He would do it because he was sure he was right. He'd do it because he was cocky and thought he was invincible, that laws didn't apply to him, that all he needed was luck. He'd do it because he thought he was protecting me.  
  
The day cycle was just starting, the gray light of fake dawn signaling the beginning of the work day. I wondered how I'd become such a sound sleeper that not once, but twice, Duo could extract himself from the bed we shared, dress himself, gather his possessions and leave the room without my so much as stirring. I wondered if we'd both gotten too used to the dynamic we'd had at RCNP. Duo always left, and I waited for him to return. If this day ended as I thought it probably would, he would have many fewer opportunities to pick up and go whenever he chose.  
  
I ran after the local trolley that I knew headed in the right general direction, reaching and just managing to grab onto the rear rail, a big man in a suit and modest turban laughing and reaching down to catch my arm and haul me the rest of the way on. Already out of breath, I gasped out a thank you before bending over to steady myself. My doctor would have had an aneurysm if he knew what I was doing to myself, how I was wasting the amount of time and money he'd put into my body. Except I wasn't wasting it. Without his help, I'd have still been maneuvering my wheelchair out of the hotel lobby. I'd never have escaped Karl when he showed up at Asmaa's house. I'd never have been able to help Duo get his ship off the ground.  
  
I'd have to write him a thank you note when I had the time - most likely when I was back in my coveralls.  
  
I tried to picture Duo in similar attire and the image sprang to mind as though I'd already seen him dressed like a convict. I tried to picture him living the life I had led, shuffling through food lines in the mess hall, heaving mounds of clothes out of the washing vats and into the dryers, surviving the showers with that stupid braid and honest grin. He faded and became insubstantial then, a blurry outline of Duo. They'd shave his head, so he wouldn't even have the braid. Duo may have grown up a destitute thief, but he was always free in that he could go where he wanted, a prince of territory that nobody cared to claim. But in a gray jumpsuit, he would wander the grounds and get into trouble for not being at work when he was supposed to. He'd be sentenced to more time in the damp hell of the laundry. He'd get into lots of fights, many of which he wouldn't win. Someone would hurt him once and they'd spread it around that Duo was easy, and that'd be the end of him.  
  
I almost jumped off the trolley before it had started to slow down for the next stop, but the man who'd helped me get on grabbed my arm again to keep me still until the trolley had stopped moving. "Stay out of trouble!" he called as I bolted for the nearest pay phone. I nearly fumbled my change before shoving a bunch of coins into the slot. I waited impatiently until the option for inter-colony/satellite calls came up, then punched in Heero's number, and didn't know whether to hope that he would answer or whether it'd be better to leave him a message. His voice message picked up after five rings, asking in his nasal monotone for a name and number.  
  
"Yuy, Maxwell's in trouble. I expect you're a week away from us, on Earth, but if for some reason you're swinging by L4 territory, Duo's trying to play hero and he'll throw his life away before anything good comes out of it. You have to talk to Une to work out a deal. You can't let him do any jail time for this. It was my idea to begin with; I coerced him into coming out here. If you get this, we're at Winner mansion. Maybe there's someone you can send, someone you trust." Then I hung up because I was saying stupid, useless things to someone who very likely could do nothing to help. We'd passed out of Heero and Trowa's sphere of influence when we'd left them behind on that gravel lot.  
  
I started to run again, calling up the layout of the quadrant and hoping that I was still headed in the right direction. I ignored the strange looks I received from pedestrians and cyclists and focused on keeping my body in even, easy motion. If I could keep my hamstrings from cramping up, then I'd be in good shape to fight if I had to, even if it was only to deck Duo before he did something stupid.  
  
I finally slowed and then stopped about a block from the Winner estate. Up until that point, it had been difficult to see more than the next house ahead of me - they were all set so close together - and I had despaired of finding Duo before he made it to the house. There was just too much ground to cover, too many places to keep out of sight until it was too late. Now, as I came upon the estate, I found a wide-open space all around the house. It made the mansion appear separate and special, and it gave anyone inside a clear view of all who approached.  
  
I hadn't really thought much beyond this point. As I stepped out onto the broad, green lawn, I thought only of surrendering to whoever was surely waiting for me inside those doors. If Duo could be kept safe and out of an institution, then I would do whatever they asked. Approaching the mansion, my heart was even and strong. I was ready to accept the consequences for our actions. I took a slow, deep breath and thought that, really, this felt only like making arrangements to go home. This time with Duo hadn't been real freedom anyway.  
  
While my mind and spirit may have been prepared for whatever lay inside the Winner mansion, my body was not prepared for two strong hands wrapping around my forearm and tugging me to a stop. Those hands were heralded only by the faintest scuffing of a boot on pavement and then Duo stood in front of me, a hand on my chest to keep me from going any further. My reaction was not one to be proud of. His cheeky grin vanished when I grabbed his arm and threw him over my hip, smacking both his shoulder blades onto the ground.  
  
He grunted in surprise and pain as I knelt over him, keeping one hand pressed into his shoulder, holding his wrist in the other.  
  
"Wu - !"  
  
My calm was abruptly elsewhere. I turned my wrist, twisting his arm dangerously close to breaking. He went white as a sheet and froze, not even breathing.  
  
"You were waiting here for me. You knew I would come."  
  
He dared to nod.  
  
" _Why_? Why would you bother?"  
  
He shifted his shoulders and I twisted harder. He whined and tried a few times to swallow. "I didn't want to break my promise to you," he finally managed to gasp out. "I wouldn't go in alone, like you said."  
  
"I _know_ what I said," I hissed, bearing down on him a moment longer, until I saw real fear there, and then easing back. "This is _not_ okay, what you're doing, how you're treating me."  
  
I stood up and didn't offer him any help. He pushed himself into a sitting position, cradling his arm close to his chest. "I - I know," he stuttered. "But we weren't getting anywhere. I was tired of waiting to happen upon the right person when we _knew_ where we had to go to get answers. I was tired of - "  
  
"Of being cautious? Of being smart?" I folded my arms across my chest. "Just what do you think is going to happen to us when we're caught? Where do you think we'll go? House arrest with Yuy and Barton? Weekend community service? I went to one of the _nice_ places, with allotted free time and literature classes. We very likely won't be going to a place like that."  
  
I wasn't scaring him, no matter how hard I was trying to. He scrambled to his feet, glaring at me like he couldn't believe how stubborn I was being. "Or we might find no one at all! Iria Winner could be waiting inside with tea and answers! We could be out of there in an hour! We could go home!"  
  
I laughed out loud and grabbed his elbow, pulling him toward the house. "That's a fantastic idea. I'm tired of this, anyway, tired of running with you. Let's get this over with so we _can_ both go home."  
  
He pulled his arm out of my grip, hissing softly as he tugged on the arm I'd almost broken. "Wu, look," he said, pointing toward the front entrance, then carefully massaging his elbow. "It's her; it's Iria."  
  
I looked up to see that he was right. Quatre's closest sister stood in the open doorway, watching and waiting for us, arms wrapped around her middle, posture stiff and wary. Whether it was because she was just anxious to see us, or because there were Preventer agents directly behind her, I was too far away to guess. As we drew closer, Duo touched my arm, leaning closer to speak so only I could hear. "Look, I'm sorry. You're right that I haven't been treating you like I trusted you. I haven't let you help me. It seems like all we do is fight and I - "  
  
"Save it."  
  
I felt him hesitate, felt his next words on the tip of his tongue, but he decided finally to listen to me and fell behind a step, letting me lead the way. We were within a few paces of the front entrance and I debated whether or not to even ask about Quatre or CWI. I could simply turn us both in, asking her to call the police as soon as we were inside. But beyond seeming fatalistic and cowardly, that would also have been more cruel than I could manage right then, however angry I was with Duo.  
  
So when we reached the steps, I only bowed to her. She returned the greeting with the sort of poise that came from years of training. "Thank you for agreeing to see us," I said. "It means a lot given the nature of our call."  
  
She nodded and stayed firmly in the doorway, neither inviting us in nor turning us away. "My brother spoke so highly of you, Wufei. He was crushed when he couldn't help you further with your trial. It was something he regretted deeply and mentioned often."  
  
I lowered my eyes in acknowledgment. "I couldn't have asked for a truer fried. It was an honor to be with him for that short time."  
  
Finally she turned sideways, beckoning us to enter. "He would want me to help you," she said quietly. "I'm only sorry I can't do more."  
  
Both Duo and I hung back for a moment, exchanging a quick glance before following her. I could see that he was excited, despite our angry words. I couldn't decide whether to be furious or worried as we stepped into the house.  
  
Entering the mansion, we could see immediately that something was off. The place was silent and empty of all life. Not even a servant approached to ask for our coats. We walked through one opulent room after the next and saw no one. There was no music, not even the sound of a television from any of the doorways we passed. I knew that many of the Winner sisters lived in the mansion with their families. There should have been children getting ready for school. There should have been a small army of housekeepers and cooks, preparing the richest family on L4 for their day. But there was no one.  
  
Iria spoke abruptly, glancing quickly over her shoulder. "What was it you wanted to know about my brother?" she asked. "Duo, you didn't say much when we spoke last night."  
  
I waited for Duo to start, but he didn't, so I jumped right in. "We wanted to know what sort of involvement Quatre had with many of the local business and public figures around the quadrant in organizing a civilian initiative to keep watch and look out for each other. It was part of a widespread push between all the colonies, or at least it was supposed to be, but as we understand it, it didn't really get off the ground. We also wanted to know whether he knew anything about Dilawar Said's death, since it happened very close to his own and they were both actively involved in the planning of the civilian initiative." I paused to judge her reaction. She'd been nodding slowly as I spoke. "That's what we came here to discuss." I looked back quickly to see Duo give me an encouraging nod. "And since, aside from your pursuits as a doctor, you worked closely with Quatre in much of what he did politically, we thought you might be able to help us."  
  
Iria paused before stepping into what appeared to be a study. We were now deep inside the mansion. I could see an inner courtyard through the windows of the room ahead of us. Duo and I stopped, waiting for her to speak. "You're not wrong to wonder about that time right before my brother died," she finally said, voice barely above a whisper. "My sisters were all trying to understand what he was feeling in those final weeks, but he wouldn't let us close to him. His empathy was so strong and his heart so weak, if we got too close and our concern for him was too obvious, it sent him into a fit. We stayed away from him, even though it broke out hearts to do so. But I know that just before he died, this initiative that you speak of mattered to him a great deal. I know that he both loved it and was deeply troubled by it. I only know the Said name because, when I did see Quatre, when he was feeling well enough, he mentioned that name with great concern." She took a slow, deep breath and squared her shoulders. "That's all I really know of either of your questions. I'm sorry."  
  
Duo spoke at my back. "If it's not too much trouble, Iria, could we sit down with you for a bit? We want to talk about our friend, and we've traveled so far to see you."  
  
She looked us both over with large sad eyes, clearly hesitating. "Today isn't a very good day," she said vaguely. I tensed up, but Duo persisted.  
  
"Please."  
  
She looked over her shoulder, into the study and finally nodded. "Follow me."  
  
Duo nudged me forward when I also hesitated and, together, we walked into the lavishly furnished room. But Iria didn't stop in the study. She continued through to an adjacent room, a smaller, windowless chamber that appeared to be for conferences. Still ahead of Duo, I stepped through, lifting my eyes to the walls to see them lined with men, a few of whom I recognized. They stared at me with blank eyes, eyes that said they were prepared to carry out something unpleasant. I stopped cold by the large table in the middle, even as Iria kept walking, her shoulders still rigid.  
  
The noise I tried to make got stuck in my throat, too undecided between alarm, anger and fear.  
  
I whipped about to see Duo, still in the study, looking around himself, also in shock as more men flooded in through the door we'd just entered and closed it behind them. He looked back to me just as Karl went to the door connecting the two rooms and pushed it shut. Then we both shouted and finally forced ourselves into action. I ran for the door just before it closed, trying to get myself through in time to rejoin Duo, but I wasn't fast enough.  
  
"Don't fight them!" I shouted too late. Karl stood with his back against the solid wood door, his hand firmly on the knob. He still looked like hell, though I'd only seen him this excited back at RCNP, after the two men who'd bullied him so cruelly had been found dead. I aimed a strike for his throat, ready to skip right to the part where I killed him if it meant escaping. He wasn't a fantastic fighter, but he'd always had good reflexes, twisting out of the way of the strike, but keeping his hand on the knob. I followed the jab with my knee, but he managed to protect his middle, turning and taking the hit on the side of his leg.  
  
"No, actually he should fight," he said in a rush, before I could strike him again. "Those men didn't come to talk."  
  
I hesitated. Through the door, I heard the first sounds of a struggle. Something struck the shared wall hard enough that pictures shuddered. I heard a loud curse that was definitely Duo. Then I heard another that definitely wasn't.  
  
"Who are they?" I asked, drawing back my fist.  
  
He looked up at my hand and smiled. "They are all the people you've managed to scare this week with your snooping around."  
  
"No," I snapped. "I've never seen any of them before. But I have seen you, you and two of these men. I imagine the rest are the bullies who've been harassing Asmaa Said."  
  
He put his back to the door once more, daring me to try and hit him again. I wasn't sure whether to step back or throttle him.  
  
"You're correct on that count, but as for the men currently beating the snot out of your _partner_..." He sneered when he said the word. "I was being perfectly serious. You've made enough enemies in seven days to warrant the most powerful men in the quadrant contacting me with their concerns. Luckily, I knew where you'd eventually turn up so they could send their thugs to do the dirty work for them. But they're not here just to rough him up enough to scare him off the colony."  
  
I raised my eyes to the door, as though I could see through to the other side. I didn't say anything, but Karl could read me like a book. He'd always taken pleasure in that.  
  
"After what happened in the laundry, you'd recognize an execution squad when you saw one, wouldn't you?"  
  
It was becoming difficult to breath. I stepped back as though struck when a body slammed into the door, rattling the latch. Judging by the number of men shouting, Duo was holding his own. But then a gunshot sounded, sending the body that had just hit the door, flying back into it. I heard Duo's voice then - harsh, loud, furious, in pain - just as, behind me, Iria started to cry.  
  
"You lied," she said, brokenly, her voice shaky through her sobs. "You said you were here only to apprehend them, to take them back to Earth. You said you weren't going to hurt them."  
  
I snapped, then, seeing as clearly as if I were there Duo slumped on the floor, bleeding out from a gut shot, a dozen men circled around him, doing their masters' bidding, making sure he didn't get up again. I shoved Karl out of the way and snarled an ugly laugh in his direction when he stumbled and fell. Another man moved to stop me, lunging at me with his first. I twisted sideways as the strike went by my cheek, catching his other fist when he tried to punch me again, twisting it and dragging him down, right onto the sharp side of my hand as it met his carotid. Another man grabbed me from behind, and I shoved both elbows back into his ribs, dropping down and shrugging out from under him. I turned to face him, blocking a kick aimed for my groin and managing to get an arm under his calf, pushing up and throwing him off balance. I followed him backward and shoved him hard in the chest. His head cracked on the table as he fell, and I was already at the next man's throat, stepping between his legs and twisting him down to the floor. The sound of a firearm being drawn stopped me a hair short of snapping his arm. Iria choked on a scream and I looked up to find a fourth man pointing a gun at her temple, daring me to keep fighting.  
  
"You _lied_ ," she said again. "You said you were from the Rehabilitation center, but what kind of people would do this?"  
  
"We didn't lie," Karl grunted, pushing himself to his feet.  
  
"We are from RCNP," another voice spoke, "here to collect one of our own who's strayed from the pack."  
  
The lights were dim in the small conference room and, for the first time, I looked to a shadowed corner, across the table in the middle, to see a man stepping forward, the last I would have expected.  
  
"Rorty?"  
  
The prison counselor stood before me, as real as Karl, looking tired and frustrated. For the span of several seconds I could only stare at him, thinking back over everything Duo and I had suspected and found together, questioning all of it as I was faced with evidence that, really, RCNP had simply come to take me back, that Prescott had sent Rorty to bring me home. There was no conspiratorial secret organization that was quietly eliminating old war leaders. There was only Rorty and Prescott, making sure that I completed the program, that I didn't screw up my future beyond their ability to help.  
  
But Karl, perhaps unwittingly, had saved me from that admittedly comforting notion. He'd said that all those men in the other room, the ones beating and shooting at my best friend, worked for the men we'd questioned this past week. I looked at Rorty and knew that he wasn't here to save me or to take me home. He was here to make sure that he finished what he'd started when - I looked to Karl - when he'd told Karl to rally a bunch of his old, easily manipulated fuck buddies and take me out - right after I had gone to him to confess that I thought Karl was about to get me in trouble. I looked at him and realized I'd found that missing connection between Earth and L4. The connection was someone I already knew.  
  
"You were Quatre's shrink. You were the one he recommended to Dilawar Said. You - " I hesitated when Rorty turned to the man holding Iria at gunpoint.  
  
"Get her out of here," he said. "And watch her. Make sure she doesn't get hurt."  
  
I could have slipped out with them. I saw my opportunity the moment the door was open. I could have darted out ahead of them and helped Duo, gotten him out of that room if by some miracle he was still alive. But when I heard the click of a safety, I abandoned that prospect, knowing who I'd find with the gun. I turned to see Rorty aiming his handgun at my face with the gall to look sorry that he was doing it.  
  
"It _was_ you wasn't it," I repeated, hoping that Rorty would want to talk, would want to gloat. I edged closer to Karl. "You worked in the colonies before you came to RCNP. Your resume was posted on the website. Anyone could see it. They were so proud to have an experienced counselor working at the brand new rehabilitation facility, one who had worked with PTSD patients, someone who knew how to pick out the troublemakers, who could identify the leaders that might pose a political threat if given the chance."  
  
Rorty's gun didn't budge. He looked so sad that I briefly considered apologizing. But that was his talent, getting his patients to realize their own guilt and repent for him. For peace.  
  
"What happened with Quatre?" I asked. "He may have come to you because he was an emotional wreck by the end, but he would have been your most dangerous patient. As an empath, he would recognize you for what you were; he would have known your soul the second you felt anything strong enough for him to latch onto." My throat threatened to close when I pictured what Quatre must have felt when he realized what Rorty intended, how he intended to use the community watch initiative that Quatre had loved so dearly. I had no doubt that Rorty had played a large part in what that organization had evolved into. Karl had confirmed that for me. "What did he find out that forced your hand?" I pressed. "Was it Said? The man he'd put in your sights? The man he unintentionally helped you kill?"  
  
I paused, trying to calm down, trying to find my center again. I strained my senses but now heard nothing from the other room. For all I knew those men had gone already, leaving Duo behind. Or worse, taken him with them if he wasn't dead, retribution for his prying. Their employers would want to know everything he knew about them.  
  
Rorty lowered the gun marginally, to about chest level. "Are you finished?" he asked.  
  
"No," I spat. "I have one more question."  
  
Rorty smiled, slow and kind and attentive. He'd been a good counselor; even I had liked him. "Ask away. I can see this has been very productive for you."  
  
"How'd you get him to take all those sleeping pills?"  
  
Rorty looked as though he were proud of me. "They were in his food. With his condition, he had a remarkable appetite. He always cleaned his plate."  
  
It was true. Any time we were together during my trial, Quatre ate like an adolescent boy, not someone weak and sick. "You poisoned him," I said softly, the image of Quatre eagerly consuming his lunch and then falling asleep shortly afterward, unsure of why he was suddenly so tired, coming to me unbidden and unwanted. Still, I was glad, even then, to know that Quatre hadn't been so desperate as we'd been led to believe, that, given the chance, he would have kept fighting.  
  
"He was infinitely more dangerous than any of the rest of you," Rorty said, lifting the gun again. "You always walked a dangerous edge, Chang, one I wanted you to stay clear of. If your friend Maxwell hadn't been so closely involved with you, I imagine we wouldn't be here, doing this. But we are, and it ends today, now. I am happy to perform this service for the peace."  
  
I regretted that I hadn't been able to tell Duo he was right. I regretted that Duo had faced down a dozen men alone, only able to guess and fear what had happened to me. I regretted that Heero and Trowa didn't know what sort of peace they were defending. I regretted that I hadn't completed the program at the rehabilitation center, that I wouldn't get to live in the world I was being reconditioned for.  
  
The gun fired just as a body's full weight slammed into my side, knocking me down and pressing me into the floor. I landed hard on my shoulder and bit back a groan, protecting my head with my arms when the gun fired again. The body on top of me jerked and labored breaths wheezed loudly in my ear. Then the door flew open and I heard shouts of "Preventers, no one move!" and "Put down your weapons! Put them down now!" "Keep your hands where we can see them. Now, turn around and face the wall, both hands on the wall!" Several pairs of feet entered the room, stepping over and around us where I lay stunned and Karl lay shot.  
  
I stared up at him as he struggled to breathe. He smiled at me and it was ugly, his teeth already pink with foamy blood, blood from his lungs. He coughed feebly and some of it sprayed on my shirt and face. The feel of it, warm and sticky, finally ended my paralysis, and I carefully slid out from under him, helping him to sit up, feeling under his clothes for the wound. He groaned in pain and coughed some more when I found a messy entrance wound on the right side of his back. I felt bits of chipped rib and fought back a wave of nausea.  
  
"It's okay," he rasped, leaning heavily against my side. "That's why we have two lungs, right?"  
  
"You don't want to have just one lung, Karl," I said, pressing my hand against the wound, feeling his blood pulse out over my fingers. "You'd have to quit smoking."  
  
"Mm," he confirmed. "It'd be the kick in the pants I needed."  
  
I glanced up at the chaos around us and then back out into the study. I didn't see Duo anywhere. "Thank you for saving my life," I said, quickly finding Rorty and just as quickly looking away from him. He was staring at me. "How many times is it now?"  
  
His head had fallen against my shoulder. With my other hand I ran my fingers through his hair. He really looked nothing like Quatre. In the commotion, I sought anyone that could be a medic, but everyone was busy pointing guns and slapping on handcuffs.  
  
"Oh, at least twice. I told them not to kill you in the laundry. I told them to make it look like they meant to. I'm sorry about Onur." He hacked and wheezed, and I tried to hold him steady. "I'm so sorry. But I had to get you out. Rorty told me to get rid of you, so I had to."  
  
"Why didn't you tell me?"  
  
"I did. Three times."  
  
"Why didn't you tell me when I wasn't so doped up I thought you were a hallucination?"  
  
"You had to figure it out. You had to find the connections. Rorty wouldn't tell me anything; he didn't trust me enough. You had to draw the fire."  
  
I heard several familiar voices then, one of which I nearly wept for. "Preventers waited too long to come help us," I said, angry that he was in such pain. "Why didn't they stop Rorty before he shot you?"  
  
He didn't respond, only pointing to his leg, where, when I bent down to pull at the cuff of his pants, I found a wire. We'd all been used, all three of us.  
  
I looked up when I heard my name, seeing Duo propped up between Heero and Trowa, his left leg heavily bandaged and already bleeding through. He was gray and shaky with blood loss, and he had rapidly swelling bruises on his jaw and over his eye. His left wrist was splinted. Since Heero couldn't grip his arm, he braced a hand on Duo's chest as they came forward. Trowa looked at the amount of blood Karl had gotten all over me, and showed a moment of real fear before I shook my head and mouthed, "I'm fine."  
  
"Are you free of all this now?" I asked Karl, keeping my voice low, for only him. I finally saw the Preventer medic squad approaching, probably just having packed up their supplies from helping Duo.  
  
Karl wheezed a laugh. "Definitely not. I've got a long career with Preventers to look forward to. I didn't have much say in my recruitment. What about you?"  
  
I watched my friends' careful approach as they stepped around handcuffed men being read their rights. "I have no idea. But I'll let you know."  
  
When the three medics arrived, pushing a gurney through the doorway, I handed Karl over to them with a murmured goodbye. He was fading in and out by then and didn't hear me. Then I turned to Duo who was stubbornly trying to get Trowa and Heero to release him. I saved him the trouble and strode up to him, drinking in every last breathing and cursing inch of him. I nodded to them both and Trowa let go of Duo's arm so that he could rest it heavily on my shoulder, and lean most of his weight on me. He looked at me, expression relieved and pained and contrite.  
  
I pressed my forehead to his, hesitant to touch him with the hand covered in Karl's blood. "I thought you were dead," I murmured, letting the words fall from my mouth like a terrible burden.  
  
He touched his nose to mine and nearly groaned, "Likewise. That's twice now. Please stop it."  
  
However, before I could agree to Duo's request, we were interrupted by not one, but two irate women.  
  
I spotted Une behind Trowa and quickly backed away from Duo. When I saw Francesca Prescott beside her, looking just as pissed, I dropped my eyes to the floor. It was remarkable that even though I now knew I'd been working for them, I could still feel chastised and cowed by a look from either one. I realized Prescott was glaring at Rorty when he brushed by us as he was led from the room, a Preventer at each elbow. Then she turned her gaze back to me.  
  
"We owe you a great debt, Chang."  
  
I started at the use of my family rather than my given name, a mark of respect she had not yet afforded me.  
  
"We would never have been able to discover how far Rorty's network of contacts extended without the work you and Maxwell did."  
  
I looked down at Duo's bandaged leg and then to the medics quickly wheeling Karl out of the room, one holding an IV bag, another compressing an oxygen pump over his mouth, a third pushing the gurney. I couldn't bring myself to answer her.  
  
"But until we can get all this sorted out," Une began, nodding to Heero and Trowa, "we have to take you both into custody. It's only temporary, and it's for your own safety."  
  
Duo's head snapped up, and his expression revealed he clearly hadn't been expecting that. I felt only numbness and relief.  
  
"We don't need to use the cuffs, though, right gentlemen?" She glared at Duo, who then looked to me, eyes wide and questioning.  
  
"No, ma'am," I answered for the both of us. With another stern look and a nod from Prescott, the two women turned away to oversee the removal of the remaining men, leaving the four of us alone. I took Trowa's place at Duo's side, ducking under his arm and supporting him under his ribs.  
  
"Easy," he said with a forced grin. "Duo got knocked around a little today."  
  
I loosened my grip a bit. "Maybe you wouldn't have if Preventers had been a little faster with the back up."  
  
Heero immediately stiffened and Trowa's mouth pinched into a straight line. "If it hadn't taken you so long to get all that out of Rorty, we could have been there sooner. As it was, I had to keep Heero from breaking down the door too early."  
  
"Hey, we understand, right, Wu? It's all water under the bridge now anyway."  
  
We started for the door, Heero and I practically carrying Duo between us. As we passed out of the room, I touched Heero's arm across Duo's back. "And we're both very glad that you did come," I said. Heero nodded and his posture relaxed. "Though you should disregard the message I left on your phone. I wasn't really thinking clearly."  
  
"Indeed," Trowa murmured.  
  
"What message?" Duo asked. "When did you call Heero?"  
  
"It's not important now," I muttered.  
  
On our way back to the front of the mansion, we passed a still-teary Iria, speaking animatedly to two more Preventers. She paused to watch us go, lifting her hand in a small wave. I didn't wave back, but saw that Duo did, lifting his fingers against my shoulder.  
  
The front lawn was full of police cars and vans. As we walked down the front steps, several of the vans pulled away, visibly loaded down with the men who'd been lying in wait here for us. Trowa pointed me toward a car with its rear doors open, and I helped Duo into the car first before sliding in after him. Just before Heero shut the door, he leaned over to look in on us.  
  
"Don't worry," he said.  
  
I gave him a tired nod as he tapped the roof of the car and it pulled away.


	21. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream  
don't expect him to thank or forgive you.  
The best ever death metal band outta Denton  
will in time both outpace and outlive you.  
- _"The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton" Mountain Goats_

We spent the next four days in our own wing of a Winner-owned hospital out by the spaceport. Even though I hadn't been injured, the doctors wanted to monitor my back and leg, just to be sure I hadn't done permanent damage to the muscle or tendon. Une insisted because she'd paid for it, and the doctors happily complied, I suspected, because they got to poke at successfully regenerated muscle.  
  
Duo was laid up with a stitched-together bullet hole in his thigh and a reset wrist, a combination which kept him out of wheelchairs. Even though the hospital staff didn't know it, they saved themselves a lot of trouble by having to wheel him around themselves. A bed-ridden Duo was a pain in the ass, but a wheelchair-bound Duo was worse because he could find all sorts of places he wasn't allowed into.  
  
Karl was in surgery for a day and then in intensive care while the doctors tried to save his lung. Regen wasn't sophisticated enough yet to regrow lung tissue, so, after removing shards of ribs and sucking out enough blood to nearly drown him, Karl was left to recover on his own. They kept him under and intubated until they were sure he could breathe on his own. I hadn't been allowed to see him.  
  
For the most part, the nurses tried to keep me out of Duo's room to let him rest and recover. And I didn't actually mind too much, content to sit up in my own hospital bed and read. Or just sit and think. Most often, I did this with Heero. Trowa took on the task of keeping Duo occupied. Neither Heero nor Trowa left the hospital while we were there. They slept on couches the first night and on cots brought into our rooms after that. They didn't appear angry at us, though with both of them, it was difficult to tell.  
  
Sitting with Heero, enjoying the silence and a game of Rummy, I finally gave in and asked him.  
  
"Should we have asked you and Trowa to come with us?"  
  
Heero looked up from his cards and thunked the two front legs of his chair back onto the floor before laying down three sevens. Then he put his feet back up on the bed frame and pushed back onto two legs again. He shuffled his remaining cards into a different order and frowned. I wasn't sure he would answer until he shook his head and shrugged.  
  
"What does that mean?" I asked, drawing a card and then getting rid of it. I still had garbage in my hand.  
  
"It means I haven't figured that out yet," Heero murmured. "But I think it was probably good that you didn't ask. Because we probably would have gone with you." He leaned forward to draw from the pile, adding it to his hand and then discarding. "And at the time, that would have been a bad decision on our part."  
  
"Even though Une was working with Prescott to bring down Rorty?"  
  
He nodded. "We didn't know anything about that until we offered to go after you ourselves."  
  
"And Une told you not to rush off."  
  
He nodded again. "But I wish you'd told us anyway. At least told us that you were planning to leave."  
  
"Duo would have had to be the one to tell you. And he didn't want to screw things up for either of you by bringing you into it."  
  
"He did manage to screw things up for himself quite spectacularly, though."  
  
A fact I was sure Trowa was scolding him for even now. "He was just being himself. He was being my friend." I looked up as soon as those words left my mouth. "Not that you weren't. But Duo - "  
  
Heero's mouth twitched. "Duo would do just about anything for you. He broke more laws than I can count on one hand. And he'd probably do it again if he thought he had to."  
  
I realized my expression mirrored his. "It's really kind of a pain, knowing that he's ready to leap like that."  
  
Heero's smirk pressed into more of smile. "It must be a real burden for you having a friend like that."  
  
It actually was, and when I didn't return Heero's smile, his intimate understanding of guilt told him why. "I've gotten him into more trouble than he's ever had before. He could go to prison for longer than me over this. Even though it was his decision to take me out of the hospital and go to L4, I was the one to ask for his help long before that. He did it for me. So I'm doing this to him."  
  
Heero dropped his chair forward again. "We're working on that. I told you not to worry. Hopefully by the time we leave for Earth, it'll be close to settled."  
  
I finally had something to lay down, lining up three queens on the table between us. "Are you going to tell me how you're settling it?"  
  
He shook his head. "Not until we're sure."  
  
I scowled. "That's not fair."  
  
Heero took a slow breath, then laid down the rest of his cards, looking up at me with another smirk. "Well I'm not going to tell you. And Trowa isn't telling Duo either. So you'll just have to wait." He twisted around in his seat, stretching his back and popping several vertebrae. "I'm hungry. Would you like to go to the cafeteria for some food? Maybe we could eat in Duo's room."  
  
I didn't need a second invitation to get out of my room, so I reached for the sweatshirt hanging over the back of the bed and slid my feet to the floor, turning back to Heero when I was ready to go. "I'll buy if you answer one question. A different one from the one you and Trowa won't answer."  
  
He tensed, then looked curious. "You have money?"  
  
I sniffed. "That's a rude question, but yes, I still have some of the money Howard wired to Duo, enough to buy food for the four of us anyway. Now will you answer my question?"  
  
We were halfway down the hall, headed for the cafeteria by the time he nodded. "What is it?"  
  
"How long have you and Trowa been together?"  
  
Watching him with frequent sidelong glances, I saw him swallow a few times and then start to flush. "I've never had a different partner in Preventers. We became partners when we joined."  
  
"I know that part. That's not the part I'm talking about."  
  
"I suppose you think the other part is your business, somehow."  
  
"Trowa's bitchiness is rubbing off on you. And isn't it?"  
  
"I'll tell you if you tell me about Duo."  
  
"Deal."  
  
He nodded to the Preventers stationed by the elevators and waited until the doors had closed before finally answering. "Almost three years." He looked quickly in my direction and when I didn't say anything, he elaborated. "Right after the second war, before you'd been released from custody, I went to L4 to check on Quatre and Trowa followed me."  
  
The doors opened onto the top floor, where the cafeteria looked out over the city. "Three years is a long time," I said, not knowing what else was appropriate in the circumstances.  
  
Heero shrugged. "It doesn't feel like it." We grabbed our trays and got into the sandwich line. He gave me another quick, furtive look. "Don't tell him you know. Please."  
  
Since my admittance to the hospital, the first time, right after the fight in the laundry, I hadn't seen any of the hesitance, any of the guilt, or instability that sometimes came to the surface when Heero was surprised or felt cornered. But that made sense; he'd had a task ever since then - 'find and help Duo and Wufei.' Ordering food now, after that task had more or less been completed, his unease was back. There were a lot of things Heero still wasn't sure of, one of which appeared to be how his friends perceived his relationship with Trowa.  
  
"I won't tell him. And unless Duo has already told him about us, I'd appreciate it if you kept that to yourself, too."  
  
Heero liked to reciprocate, so he nodded without hesitating. "Though I don't really know anything worth telling him," he added, with another quick glance.  
  
I grabbed two sandwiches from the cooler, both of them egg salad. "Well," I started, "what would _you_ do if you were stuck on a tiny ship for a week with the same person?"  
  
He snorted a sharp laugh. "I would have had Duo bound and gagged by the end of the second day."  
  
"But if he were Trowa?"  
  
For the barest second, Heero's features relaxed into a sly grin. "Point taken."

+

When we returned to our wing, lunch in hand, we headed straight for Duo's room, finding them in much the same positions as when we'd visited before - Duo despondently trying to turn the pages of an automechanics magazine with the swollen red fingers of his left hand, Trowa slouched in a chair, his long legs crossed, one arm thrown over the back, the other holding a book. They both looked up when we entered, and they both looked eager for the change of scenery.  
  
"Food! Wufei, you are a kind man," Duo exclaimed, dropping the magazine onto the floor and straightening his uninjured leg. Then he carefully shoved himself over on the bed to make room for me while Heero pulled up a chair next to Trowa, handing him his sandwich with a murmured, "Here."  
  
Trowa accepted with an even softer "Thank you," and that was all the ceremony we got. Duo and I could watch for hours and still have no indication as to the depth of their relationship. I was glad I'd finally asked.

+

They moved Karl from intensive care to a regular room on the fifth day, the day we were all going back to Earth. Karl would stay for another week or two, until he could safely make the journey, before following us on another transport. The morning we were to leave, I went to his room and found him asleep. The rings around his eyes had faded a little, though he still looked haggard. Knowing how much trouble he had sleeping usually, I hesitated to wake him. But the doctors would know about his insomnia; they probably already had him on serious drugs to make sure that he could rest and recover. So I stood by his bed and gently shook his arm, stepping back and pulling a chair closer to sit by him.  
  
He winced as he came awake, a hand reaching for his chest. His lungs must have ached despite the pain medicine dripping into his arm. When he blinked his eyes open and rolled his head to look at me, he smiled a little. "Tables have turned, eh? You here to taunt me like I taunted you?"  
  
"That wouldn't be very nice," I said. "And besides, I don't have much to taunt you with."  
  
"Hm, no word yet on what Prescott's gonna do with you? Future's still up in the air?"  
  
I nodded.  
  
"Then why are you here? I don't think that pesky honor of yours will let you beat up an invalid."  
  
"I don't have any desire to hurt you either, though I'd stay away from Duo for awhile, if I were you. He doesn't let go of anything easily."  
  
"Be it a person or a grudge?" Even now, he was trying to get to me, but I wasn't about to be embarrassed by innuendo.  
  
"That's right."  
  
He looked up at the ceiling. "You know, it was obvious to anyone who looked that he liked you from the very beginning."  
  
I frowned at him even though he didn't seem to notice. "There wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, was there. Not when I was two months into my sentence, not when I was two years in."  
  
"That's true."  
  
"And what's it to you anyway? Don't tell me you're jealous." I wasn't sure he was capable of such a thing.  
  
He exhaled a careful laugh and looked at me askance. "Why wouldn't I be? You were nicer to me than anyone else in that place. You were also much more interesting. And I was your first. That's not something you just forget."  
  
"Karl, you manipulated me every step of the way. You may have been my first," and I flushed in spite of myself, "but you used me. You were screwing around with any number of other inmates and staff. You ratted me out to a man who tried to kill me. You ruined anything good that we may have had."  
  
It was the truth, and it came out easily, but listening to myself say it, I still felt cruel. Karl kept his eyes on the ceiling."I didn't want to. I know I did, and I know I'm not sorry, but I didn't want to. If that means anything."  
  
"You could tell me why. If there's more to it than that you didn't want to be bored, then you could tell me why you did it."  
  
He gave a tired sigh. "What do you want to know?"  
  
"When you realized Rorty was behind Benji's death. He was, wasn't he?"  
  
Karl nodded, messing up his hair on the pillow. "Yeah, that was Rorty. It was after you and I had decided to start looking into it, when you were just bringing Duo onto the case. You and he were investigating in your way, and I did it in mine."  
  
I laughed. "What, did you seduce him or something?"  
  
He rolled his eyes at me.  
  
"Of course you did," I mumbled, answering my own question.  
  
"Asking around the other men wasn't getting me anywhere. I needed an in with the administration. Prescott would have crushed my balls under her heels."  
  
I shuddered at the thought. "You are not wrong."  
  
"Rorty was approachable. He was too approachable. I got him to tell me everything about Benji. I even got him to talk about Quatre. I thought I was manipulating him when I talked him into letting me get rid of Basker and O'Malley, but they were his bargaining chip. He let me kill them and make it look like retribution for Benji, and then he got me to work for him. That was when I went to Prescott for help and told her everything about you, me, Duo, and Rorty."  
  
"I heard that part, I think," I interjected. "In the sick room with Brandt."  
  
He nodded a confirmation. "I knew you were there, and I knew what you would think about me. And that was fine. I had already told Rorty about you to try to get him to trust me. Then you went to see him and after that, he told me I had to shut you up. So I betrayed you to Rorty, not to Prescott; I figured you still had a right to hate me."  
  
"What did Prescott do when you told her?"  
  
"She'd already been in touch with Une after Benji was killed. What I told her confirmed what she was starting to suspect. When Rorty told me about Quatre, he had hinted at this network of people all over the colonies who were watching for leaders, who were looking to prevent political factions before they started. I told them about that, and said they needed to figure out who all these guys were, because Rorty wasn't telling me. I wasn't sure even he knew who they all were. I told them you were in trouble, too. I worked out a deal with them the same time I bargained with Rorty. I signed on as a Preventer for Une and I agreed to hunt you down for Rorty."  
  
"I'm not sure I've ever known a real live double agent before."  
  
He sucked in a breath to respond, recognized the tone of my voice, snorted a laugh and then winced. "Shut up. It was really hard."  
  
I leaned back in my chair. "You loved every second of it, jerking around two powerful people who thought they had _you_ wrapped around their fingers."  
  
"I did love it, but I was jerked around plenty, too." He hesitated, the stained fingers of his right hand plucking at the blanket, probably looking for a cigarette. "If you're looking for an apology for jerking you around, I already gave you one, when I thought I wasn't going to live to be able to do it later. But everything worked out for the both of us. We'll be full-fledged Preventers before the end of the year. We can move far, far away from each other. You and Duo can finally go at it like bunnies with no one looking over your shoulder. Really, I did you a favor."  
  
I scowled at the floor. "Neither of us can be certain about any of that."  
  
"I know Une owns my soul for the next thirty-odd years. She's got yours, too; she made sure you got the best, most expensive treatment on the market."  
  
"She had to do that because of _you_ ," I snapped. "I'm indebted to her because _you_ ratted me out to Rorty."  
  
He shrugged. "You were going to end up with her anyway. You knew that when you first got to that place."  
  
"Yes, well, I'm not so sure that's what I want now," I grumbled.  
  
That shut him up. It shut me up, too, finally saying it out loud. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a Preventer. I had no doubt that I _could_ be one. Une had wanted me to join up as soon as the second war ended, and not even three years of jail time and an impromptu trip to L4 with Duo would keep me off the roster if she had anything to say about it - especially now that I knew Duo and I had already been doing her leg work the last few months.  
  
At first, the knowledge that, out of all the men and women at RCNP in training to be docile and useful, I was the one who would become a Preventer made me feel different. It made me proud. But that didn't seem right now. 'Agent Chang' sounded like a character and felt like an ill-fitted uniform. He was someone I may have known two years ago, but now would have to find again.  
  
"What _do_ you want?" Karl finally asked.  
  
"I want to be left alone," I bit out. "I want to finish my stupid degree and then figure out how I could have gotten more out of the program than I did - because I actually do enjoy pre-colonial literature. I want to get back to my physical training on my own terms. And, sure, I'd like to get laid without someone looking over my shoulder. I'm not sure I can do any of that with Preventers."  
  
Karl gave a half-hearted grin. "Very few people can do that. And you certainly won't. We're the same in that."  
  
My shoulders slumped. I knew he was right.  
  
I looked up when I heard Duo's voice out in the hall, then quickly rose from the chair. I heard another voice murmuring under his, probably Trowa's, and turned back to Karl. "I have to go. Our flight leaves in an hour."  
  
Karl lifted his hand in a weak attempt at a wave. "Maybe I'll see you dirt-side at a staff meeting."  
  
"I hope you won't." I turned and started for the door, shrugging into one of Heero's jackets. I still didn't have any clothes of my own. I paused after zipping the jacket, turning back to look at him where he lay, hooked up to half a dozen machines. "When you get out, you should go back to pay your respects to Onur. He had no family so no one claimed the body. His ashes are still there."  
  
Karl nodded once and then turned his head to the wall, his eyes closed. I walked out to meet my friends.


	22. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> by June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from Dacia, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [A Little Piece of Gundam Wing](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Little_Piece_Of_Gundam_Wing), which closed in 2017. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after July 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [a little piece of gundam wing collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/alittlepieceofgundamwing/profile).  
> \--------  
> Okay, now it's really finished! Complete with mansex. I think this is the first real scene of this type I've written. Hopefully it serves its purpose. Thank you so much kinsugi for all your help with it! And thanks all of you for reading and leaving such kind comments! There aren't many of us left, but it's really nice to hear from people who still love the old GW!

And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon  
We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn't have his eyes on.  
900 cc's of raw whining power  
No outstanding warrant for my arrest  
Hi diddle dee dee  
Goddamn  
The pirate's life for me.  
_\- "Jenny" The Mountain Goats_

With the curtains drawn, the room was still dark and just a little stuffy. Whoever got up first always raised the thermostat. The top sheet and blankets were pushed to the end of the bed. The sound of the box fan in the corner covered our quickened breaths, though we could still hear footsteps crossing back and forth outside in the hall.  
  
"Trowa's gonna bang on that door any second, I can feel it," Duo groaned, shifting his knees wider apart on the bed and increasing his pace just enough that I had to brace my hand against the wall behind my head so I didn't bump into it.  
  
"We could have waited until after they left for work. We don't have class until ten." I pushed against the wall, sliding down the bed a bit and forcing Duo to adjust again.  
  
He shook his head, tossing hair out of his eyes. "I didn't wanna wait. You didn't either. Mmnn. You were all over me the second the alarm went off."  
  
Duo's latest angle was by far the best, and I arched back on the bed, drawing another low, needy sound out of him. Duo's movements were slow and smooth, a steady rhythm that he knew I liked. The way he pushed and pulled was confident and easy, in control. I slid my hand up his arm and across his chest, feeling out the swells and dips of muscle. Pushing myself up on one elbow, I reached around for the back of his neck, the hair at the base his braid damp with sweat. When I grabbed the rope of hair where it swung over my chest, he leaned down far enough to kiss me.  
  
"No pulling," he murmured.  
  
"No stopping," I answered, raising my knees a little higher and relaxing back onto the bed.  
  
"S'is feel good?" he asked, knowing full well that it did.  
  
I lifted my arm to the wall again and made some noise in the affirmative.  
  
My knees were pressed to his sides, my lower back and spine curved over his legs, but pushing a a bit harder against the wall, I could shift enough to feel along the line of his thigh muscle, down to the puckered scar in the middle. I rubbed my thumb over it just as he traced his fingers along the back of my leg to the scar bisecting my knee. It was a sort of ritual. Then his hand moved from my knee back up to my hip and across my stomach. I grabbed his fingers and closed them over my cock, guiding his rough palm until my breath hitched and I pushed my head back hard against the pillow.  
  
He leaned forward over me, his bangs almost brushing my chest. "Are you -- "  
  
The sound of knuckles sharply rapping on the door jolted us both, and Duo froze above me, teeth clenched.  
  
"Dammit," I muttered.  
  
"We're headed to the office," Trowa said through the door. "You want anything from the market for dinner tonight?"  
  
"Not really in a position to consider the menu right now, Barton," I called.  
  
I heard Duo whispering something under his breath, his eyes closed. I strained to hear and then smirked.  
  
"I'm grateful we're not in prison and that we have friends who care. I'm grateful we're not in prison and that we have friends who care. I'm grateful we're not in prison and that we have friends who care."  
  
"Oh, did I wake you up?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Well, just give us a call if you think of something."  
  
He was doing this on purpose, I was sure. He lived for moments like these.  
  
I started to move my hips again, hooking my legs around Duo's middle and flexing up into him. His eyes flew open and he grabbed hold of me, trying to keep me still, shaking his head.  
  
"We sure will," I said, fighting to reestablish a rhythm. Duo's hands scrambled against my skin and he bit back a groan.  
  
"Oh, and Wufei, there's coffee on the stove. It's still warm. Don't forget to take it with you when you leave for -- "  
  
"Oh my God, go _away_!" Duo finally shouted.  
  
I burst out laughing and thought I heard Trowa's soft chuckle from the other side of the door.  
  
"I am so looking forward to having our own place," Duo groaned, sagging forward again. I grabbed his arm and started to pull myself up, rolling forward until I straddled his lap. Duo shifted his legs to help settle my weight and let out a shuddering sigh against my chest. He wrapped both arms around me and thrust upward with quick, even strokes, humming contentedly when I carded my fingers through the wild fringe of hair that framed his face.  
  
He turned his head into my shoulder, nuzzling under my arm with his nose until he found the computer chip set just under the skin. He traced the shape of it with his tongue and sucked until he left a mark. The chip monitored my location and relayed it to whichever Preventer was on watch at the time. We were allowed out of Trowa and Heero's two-story flat to go to school and back and that was it. At the time that it was implanted, it itched and ached. Duo had nearly scratched his right out. Now, they were a reminder of exactly how much time we had left under house arrest. Eight months and counting.  
  
They made the surrounding skin surprisingly sensitive. I hissed and then shivered when Duo blew on the reddened spot.  
  
"Eight months," I said, "and we can do this on any flat surface we want."  
  
"Mmm, why limit ourselves? I'd take you on the front steps if you let me..." He pressed a kiss to my sternum. "In the laundry..." He leaned up to kiss my throat. "I'd highjack your shower and fuck you against the tile." His words sent a wave of heat radiating up and down my spine, and when he tipped his head back so that I could kiss him, I whispered into his mouth, "I'll hold you to that." He gripped me harder and grinned into the kiss. Then it was a heady, headlong rush to something sharp and beautiful and perfect.

+

Heero and Trowa's Brussels flat was only a short walk to the university, and although it was cold outside, with a fresh layer of snow on the sidewalks, it was a beautiful day. We walked side by side in easy silence. Bundled up in heavy coats and with packs on our backs, we looked like any number of other kids on their way to class.  
  
I could finish my degree in two semesters if I also took classes over the summer, and Duo could get his in four. He had abandoned his plans for a degree in small engine repair after I'd kicked him out of the flat in London, and especially after my sentence started at RCNP. But now, with a year to kill under close surveillance from Preventers and with nothing else to do but go from home to work or from home to school, Duo had chosen school. He said he didn't want to hang around one place too long, and really only wanted a title people would recognize for the skills he already had. He already had more practical experience with engines than most ordinary humans would gain in a lifetime.  
  
There hadn't been much talk yet of what we'd do after our probationary period was over. Duo had one more year of school than I did, and we hadn't broached the subject of whether I'd stick around for that second year. Acknowledging whether we were in that sort of relationship -- beyond whispered promises during sex -- wasn't something we'd attempted while thinking clearly. Trowa, Heero and Une expected me to take the Preventer exam. I didn't know what they expected from Duo. I had a bit of a plan of my own, though I hesitated to share it with anyone.  
  
Karl had already passed his exam and was now in need of a partner. I didn't envy whoever ended up with him, and I worried that if he still didn't have one by the time I finished school, Une would do something stupid like try to partner him with me. Actually, I was probably a good choice for him, since I already knew the way he used people. Nothing he did would surprise me.  
  
"Hey, what are you thinking about?" Duo asked when we neared the campus. "You're melting the snow with that glare."  
  
I turned to glance at him, but the sun was behind his head, so I had to look away. "Just wondering why I'm bothering with a degree in pre-colonial literature if I'm joining Preventers right after I finish," I grumbled.  
  
He chuckled, the sound a bit muffled by his scarf. "You could start a book club. I'd join. I still haven't read my first novel with you."  
  
"Starting a book club is not what I had in mind."  
  
Duo stepped over a slushy puddle in the pitted sidewalk. "What did you have in mind?"  
  
"It'll probably sound crazy, even to you," I muttered, idly kicking at a pile of snow when we stopped at the curb adjacent to school property. We waited at the crosswalk until the cars yielded to us and then quickly went across.  
  
When we were walking up the path toward the humanities building, Duo jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow. "Come on, tell me."  
  
"I haven't done much more than think about it, and talk a little with Prescott."  
  
He wrinkled his nose. "Prescott? What, like for permission?"  
  
I shoved my gloved hands into the pockets of my coat. "Yes, for permission. I asked her if I could work for her. At the Rehabilitation Center for New Pacifism."  
  
Duo stopped in his tracks, his boots scraping loudly on the salted walk. He looked down at his feet. "What kind of work?"  
  
"The real kind. Hopefully the kind with tenure."  
  
He turned to face me, and now we were both squinting against the sun. "You wanna get a teaching job there?" My silence was his answer. "Wu, you hated your classes. You only did enough work to pass."  
  
I shrugged restlessly. "The classes were stupid. The books we read were stupid. But the teachers weren't stupid, and neither were the students. Most of them were, in fact, very smart."  
  
"And you told Prescott that?"  
  
"With a bit more tact, yes."  
  
"What'd she say?" He looked like he couldn't quite believe he was having this conversation.  
  
"She laughed at me."  
  
He crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, that was mean."  
  
"Then she said she'd think about it. Then she told me to get a master's and she'd think a little harder."  
  
"Huh."  
  
We were going to be late for class, but neither of us moved from where we stood. This was too important.  
  
"Have you told anyone else this? Do Heero and Trowa know? Jesus, does _Une_ know?"  
  
I shook my head, frustrated, and pulled off my hat to scratch a hand through my hair. It was just long enough to tickle my ears. "I haven't told anyone. Doesn't mean Prescott hasn't already told Une, though. They must call each other every night before bed."  
  
Duo laughed. "That's a scary thought." He sobered quickly. "But seriously, man, what do you think she'll say?"  
  
"Une? I don't know." I shook my head again, trying to clear it of my useless fears about what other people thought. "And I don't _care._ Dammit, it's _my_ life, not hers." I gestured at Duo's arm. "She may have us both under her thumb for the next eight months, but after that, she's just another person, just somebody else who could be a boss or a coworker or _nobody_."   
  
Duo silently nodded.  
  
_I_ want to choose how I pay back my debt. And putting on a uniform so that I have the official capacity to tell other people how to live their lives is not it. I can't do that, not now, not after I've seen and lived and understood how people react when you push them. _I don't want to do it._ " I felt like shoving something for emphasis, but I restrained myself.  
  
Duo stepped a little closer and leaned forward to speak in my ear, as though what he had to say wasn't safe for anyone else to hear. "Then you shouldn't," he said. "You should do what you want." He leaned back to meet my eyes and even in the glare, I could see that they were bright with understanding.  
  
A bunch of students brushed past us, and we stepped aside to let them through. When they were gone, the silence had turned heavy. Duo ran his boot over the salt on the walk. I hitched my backpack into a more comfortable position on my shoulders.  
  
"What does this mean for you, then?" I finally asked. "What do you want to do?"

Duo shrugged, taking off his mittens and bending down to scoop up a handful of new snow. He packed it into a tight ball and then took a bite, wincing at the cold. I watched his hands turn red. "I want to own my own business, be my own boss. Fix busted engines. Build' em, take' em apart. I want to be with you."

I hid a smile inside the high collar of my coat. "If I get my master's, that's another year-and-a-half to two years added onto my schooling, probably more if I'm working."

"I've already got one more year than you do, as it stands. Another one's no big deal, so long as we don't have to live in fear of Barton's knuckles on our bedroom door."  
  
I smirked at that. "You realize we're skipping past the dating phase again. We're already living together."  
  
Duo shrugged, already comfortable on this new path we were taking. "I'm not sure I _can_ actually date someone. I don't really want to _go_ on dates." He threw the snowball and then shoved his hands back into his mittens. "I want to live with my partner."  
  
My chest tingled with heat at his words. They smoothed over the jagged questions this conversation had raised. "But what if that's in southern Italy? There's nothing to do there. And Brussels is so far. We'd hardly ever see our friends."  
  
Duo grinned. "Eh, maybe Heero and Trowa liked Rome more than they let on. And I kinda liked it at Sam's. The place had sort of a stark, brown beauty. Plus, she's got more business than she knows what to do with. She'd be thrilled if I took over some of her customers." He started walking again, and I hurried to keep pace. He swung his arm over my shoulder and spread his other arm wide, gesturing at all the possibilities. "And we'll always be tan and muscular. No more space-atrophied muscles. Lots of room for you to train, for us to train together, like you said."  
  
"Let's not make it out to be a fairytale, Duo," I grumbled, though I couldn't keep the relief out of my voice. I hadn't expected him to be so excited by the prospect of moving back to Italy for the long term.  
  
"Hey, I don't expect it to be one, Wu. I'm more concerned about your career longevity than mine. I mean, what happens when the school runs out of war criminals to reeducate? You could be outta work in a few years once they're all fixed."  
  
"I doubt it," I scoffed. "A whole generation has been turned upside down by the fighting over the last twenty years. With Prescott and Une in cahoots, there will always be a fresh crop of fuck-ups to correct."  
  
"Speaking as a freshly corrected fuck-up?"  
  
"That's right. I'd say they run a pretty solid business."  
  
We'd reached the humanities building, and I had to draw away from Duo to go to class. He stepped back and adjusted his bag on his shoulder. "Hey, let's talk some more about this tonight, okay?"  
  
"Okay. I'll see you after class, then."  
  
He grinned. "Yes, you will."

(end)


End file.
